Title: WiFi positioning overview

Authors: Lingxia Liao, Kai Lin, Xiaofei Wang, Xiaorong Lai, Son T. Vuong

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada. ' School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Ganjingzi District, Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China. ' 301-518, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, 599 Gwanak-Ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, Korea. ' Confederal Networks Inc., 256 Blaine Ct. SE, Renton, WA 98056, USA. ' Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, V6T 1Z4, Canada

Abstract: As the swift development and deployment of WiFi networking infrastructure with the lower price to provide the wider coverage, WiFi-based positioning approaches have been one of the |best practices| in both outdoor and indoor environment. In this paper, an overview of various approaches for WiFi-based positioning is presented. The WiFi-based positioning approaches are categorised into cell-ID, angle of arrival (AOA), received signal strength (RSS), time of arrival (TOA) and time difference of arrival (TDOA). The basic idea and ranging accuracy are presented to compare the different approaches. As the most practical methods, fingerprinting and TDOA approaches are elaborated and some advanced methods based on them are also provided to show the improvement. The different approaches are basically evaluated by their ranging accuracy, but the system privacy and scalability, as the other two key directions to evaluate a positioning system, are also discussed in this paper.

Keywords: WiFi positioning; triangulation; angle of arrival; AOA; fingerprinting; off-line training; online positioning; time of arrival; TOA; time difference of arrival; TDOA; received signal strength; WiFi networking.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2011.042377

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2011 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.229 - 248

Published online: 26 Feb 2015 *

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