Recent advances in floor positioning based on smartphone

Abstract

Currently, people's daily study, work, leisure are more and more concentrated in high-rise buildings. It is often difficult to quickly obtain the floor information when they are in a complex and densely populated indoor environment such as a commercial center or station. People's demand for indoor location services has already expanded from the original two-dimensional to three-dimensional. Smartphone is the best portable device for floor positioning and pedestrian navigation since it is embedded with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/Cellular, inertial and barometer sensors. Smartphone-based floor positioning system utilizes the collected measurements from these embedded sensors to estimate pedestrian’s floor information. Due to the high similarity of radio signals and the small air-pressure difference between adjacent floors, it is arduous to obtain high-precision floor information in multistory environments with low floor heights, staggered floor structures, stairwells or atrium structures. To address this issue, a lot of research has been carried out to obtain an accurate floor positioning by calculating the sensor data from the user’s smartphone. However, there still a lack of a study that can comprehensively reflect and summarize the current state of these works. In this paper, we provide an elaborate review for the existing smartphone-based floor positioning techniques. It discusses their potential applications, current challenges and future research trends. The work not only advances a better understanding of indoor positioning technology, but possibly provides clear direction to the design and development of more accurate and robust floor positioning systems based on sensors embedded in smartphone.