A fusion method based on bluetooth and WLAN technologies for indoor location

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for merging Bluetooth and WLAN technologies to face the problem of indoor positioning. Firstly, using Bluetooth measurements the zone where the target object is located is enclosed. Afterwards, processing WiFi measurements the RSS readings are compared only against the fingerprints of the points within the previously determined zone for the precise determination of the object position. In a recent work, we approached this problem by constructing simulated Bluetooth and WLAN maps and assuming that Bluetooth measurements determine precisely the zone where the object is located. Here we present a new algorithm to cope with erroneous identification of the preselected region. The performance of this method has been tested experimentally and the comparison between the localization results obtained using both technologies and using only WiFi is presented.