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Zero-configuration indoor localization over IEEE 802.11 wireless infrastructure

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Abstract

With the technical advances in ubiquitous computing and wireless networking, there has been an increasing need to capture the context information (such as the location) and to figure it into applications. In this paper, we establish the theoretical base and develop a localization algorithm for building a zero-configuration and robust indoor localization and tracking system to support location-based network services and management. The localization algorithm takes as input the on-line measurements of received signal strengths (RSSs) between 802.11 APs and between a client and its neighboring APs, and estimates the location of the client. The on-line RSS measurements among 802.11 APs are used to capture (in real-time) the effects of RF multi-path fading, temperature and humidity variations, opening and closing of doors, furniture relocation, and human mobility on the RSS measurements, and to create, based on the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) technique, a mapping between the RSS measure and the actual geographical distance. The proposed system requires zero-configuration because the on-line calibration of the effect of wireless physical characteristics on RSS measurement is automated and no on-site survey or initial training is required to bootstrap the system. It is also quite responsive to environmental dynamics, as the impacts of physical characteristics changes have been explicitly figured in the mapping between the RSS measures and the actual geographical distances. We have implemented the proposed system with inexpensive off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware and sensory functions of IEEE 802.11, and carried out a detailed empirical study in our departmental building, Siebel Center for Computer Science. The empirical results show the proposed system is quite robust and gives accurate localization results.

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Notes

  1. The current 802.11 client interface has already made such measurements to locate and associate with the AP with the strongest beacon signal.

  2. Our algorithm does not rely on a specific propagation model for indoor environments. Instead, we exploit the characteristics that the signal strength is inversely proportional to the distance to the power of a path loss exponent for constructing the SDM.

  3. Gwon and Jain [15] has also proposed a lateration algorithm, called TIX, for computing the location of a client. We did not implement the TIX algorithm, but instead used the simple lateration algorithm given in Sect. 3.3.

  4. This requirement can be relaxed if the wireless client is responsible for measuring RSSs of beacon messages from neighboring APs.

  5. or in the case that the wireless monitors are responsible for measuring RSSs, the rate of which data packets are generated at a wireless client.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the basic research project through a grant provided by the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in 2007.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communications, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Gwangju, 500-712, South Korea

    Hyuk Lim

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, IL, 61801, USA

    Lu-Chuan Kung, Jennifer C. Hou & Haiyun Luo

Authors
  1. Hyuk Lim
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  2. Lu-Chuan Kung
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  3. Jennifer C. Hou
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  4. Haiyun Luo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hyuk Lim.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in IEEE INFOCOM 2006, Barcelona, Spain, April 2006 [1].

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Lim, H., Kung, LC., Hou, J.C. et al. Zero-configuration indoor localization over IEEE 802.11 wireless infrastructure. Wireless Netw 16, 405–420 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-008-0140-3

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