Performance Evaluation of Wi-Fi Finger Printing based Indoor Positioning System

Abstract

Indoor Positioning System (IPS) is a technology that provides precise and accurate location information in indoor environments. Since Global Positioning system (GPS) relies on line of sight communications with a satellite transceiver, it does not work within buildings. To overcome this challenge, IPS technology could use RF based communication and locate humans and objects indoors. The key advantage of RF based communication is its high coverage range and non-line of sight communications. Wi-Fi finger printing is an efficient RF based technique for IPS which utilizes signal strength of wireless LAN to identify different indoor locations. In this paper, we develop an experimental testbed to implement Wi-Fi fingerprinting based IPS. We analyse the performance of Wi-Fi fingerprinting based IPS for three different indoor scenarios. Results show that Wi-Fi finger printing based IPS accurately predicts user location when the multi-path fading is low and access points are closer to the user.