Providing Databases for Different Indoor Positioning Technologies: Pros and Cons of Magnetic Field and Wi-Fi Based Positioning

Abstract

Localization is one of the main pillars for indoor services. However, it is still very difficult for the mobile sensing community to compare state-of-the-art indoor positioning systems due to the scarcity of publicly available databases. To make fair and meaningful comparisons between indoor positioning systems, they must be evaluated in the same situation, or in the same sets of situations. In this paper, two databases are introduced for studying the performance of magnetic field and Wi-Fi fingerprinting based positioning systems in the same environment (i.e., indoor area). The “magnetic” database contains more than 40,000 discrete captures (270 continuous samples), whereas the “Wi-Fi” one contains 1,140 ones. The environment and both databases are fully detailed in this paper. A set of experiments is also presented where two simple but effective baselines have been developed to test the suitability of the databases. Finally, the pros and cons of both types of positioning techniques are discussed in detail.