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Infrastructure-Free Floor Localization Through Crowdsourcing

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Abstract

Mobile phone localization plays a key role in the fast-growing location-based applications domain. Most of the existing localization schemes rely on infrastructure support such as GSM, Wi-Fi or GPS. In this paper, we present FTrack, a novel floor localization system to identify the floor level in a multi-floor building on which a mobile user is located. FTrack uses the mobile phone’s sensors only without any infrastructure support. It does not require any prior knowledge of the building such as floor height or floor levels. Through crowdsourcing, FTrack builds a mapping table which contains the magnetic field signature of users taking the elevator/escalator or walking on the stairs between any two floors. The table can then be used for mobile users to pinpoint their current floor levels. We conduct both simulation and field studies to demonstrate the efficiency, scalability and robustness of FTrack. Our field trial shows that FTrack achieves an accuracy of over 96% in three different buildings.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Hai-Bo Ye, Xian-Ping Tao & Jian Lv

  2. Department of Computer Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Hai-Bo Ye, Xian-Ping Tao & Jian Lv

  3. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, 3001, Australia

    Tao Gu

Authors
  1. Hai-Bo Ye
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  2. Tao Gu
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  3. Xian-Ping Tao
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  4. Jian Lv
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hai-Bo Ye.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National High Technology Research and Development 863 Program of China under Grant No. 2013AA01A213 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 91318301, 61373011 and 61321491.

A preliminary version of the paper was published in the Proceedings of PerCom 2012.

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Ye, HB., Gu, T., Tao, XP. et al. Infrastructure-Free Floor Localization Through Crowdsourcing. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 30, 1249–1273 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1597-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-015-1597-z

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