A grid-based indoor radiolocation technique based on spatially coherent path loss model

This paper presents a grid-based indoor radiolocation technique based on a Spatially Coherent Path Loss Model (SCPL). Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprints are collected at different positions in the environment from which the radio wave propagation for the environment is empirically approximated with the SCPL model. Unlike the conventional path loss models, SCPL approximates radio wave propagation by first dividing the localization environment into grid cells and estimating the model parameters for each grid cell. Thus, the proposed technique is able to account for attenuation, resulting from non-uniform environmental irregularities. The efficacy of the proposed technique was investigated with an experiment comparing SCPL and an indoor radiolocation technique based on a conventional path loss model. The comparison has indicated the improved performance of the SCPL by up to 44%.