Performance evaluation of CIR based location fingerprinting

Location fingerprinting has received considerable attention as a practical solution to the indoor localization problem. Specifically Received Signal Strength (RSS) based fingerprinting has been studied extensively and some improvements in performance have been reported for certain pattern recognition algorithms. Recently channel impulse response (CIR) based fingerprinting received attention due to its potential for significant improvements in accuracy. The performance evaluation of CIR fingerprinting, however, has not been addressed adequately in literature. This paper presents the performance evaluation of CIR location fingerprinting in an indoor environment. A simulation framework has been developed using the Ray-Tracing software to emulate the indoor wireless channel. The CIR-based simulation results showed noticeable improvements in the location estimation compared to the RSS-based approach. The paper highlights new findings for some parameters that affect the performance of the CIR-based fingerprinting with respect to the system bandwidth and training point spacing.