Wi-Fi Fingerprint-Based Indoor Positioning: Recent Advances and Comparisons

TLDR

Indoor location‑based services lack GPS, so Wi‑Fi fingerprinting—leveraging ubiquitous WLANs without line‑of‑sight requirements—has become a promising technique for complex indoor environments. This survey reviews recent advances in Wi‑Fi fingerprint localization, focusing on advanced localization techniques and efficient system deployment. The authors examine temporal and spatial signal patterns, user collaboration, motion sensors, and strategies to reduce offline labor, adapt to fingerprint changes, calibrate heterogeneous devices, and improve smartphone energy efficiency. By deploying these methods, the authors compare their performance and identify future research directions.

Abstract

The growing commercial interest in indoor location-based services (ILBS) has spurred recent development of many indoor positioning techniques. Due to the absence of Global Positioning System (GPS) signal, many other signals have been proposed for indoor usage. Among them, Wi-Fi (802.11) emerges as a promising one due to the pervasive deployment of wireless LANs (WLANs). In particular, Wi-Fi fingerprinting has been attracting much attention recently because it does not require line-of-sight measurement of access points (APs) and achieves high applicability in complex indoor environment. This survey overviews recent advances on two major areas of Wi-Fi fingerprint localization: advanced localization techniques and efficient system deployment. Regarding advanced techniques to localize users, we present how to make use of temporal or spatial signal patterns, user collaboration, and motion sensors. Regarding efficient system deployment, we discuss recent advances on reducing offline labor-intensive survey, adapting to fingerprint changes, calibrating heterogeneous devices for signal collection, and achieving energy efficiency for smartphones. We study and compare the approaches through our deployment experiences, and discuss some future directions.