Indoor Taxi-Cab: Real-Time Indoor Positioning and Location-Based Services with Ekahau and Android OS

Positioning and routing in outdoors environment is still challenging especially in complex buildings, where a number of buildings are combined with tunnels and bridges, and the GPS signal is unreachable. Looking for a particular room in an unfamiliar huge indoor environment or a product in an enormous store is time wasting and a real life problem that everybody faces on a daily basis. This paper presents a solution using the Ekahau positioning system and Android OS with an intermediary server, which acts between these two systems to provide actual room level positioning by a mathematical modeling technique. The system also provides the shortest path to a target destination by using Dijkstra's search algorithm. The optimal distance between the locations is modeled based on the Taxi-cab geometry distance definition for the mobile clients. Additionally, the users can also display the shortest path for items in the vicinity such as coffee machines, etc. The proposed solution has been evaluated in a real life setting at basement floor level.