Indoor navigation with use of geomagnetic anomalies

There are many applications for indoor location determination, from personal navigation to firefighting and disaster response. GPS signals are too weak for indoor use, however, and the problem of developing a reliable indoor navigation system remains unsolved. Wi-Fi fingerprinting is a promising new technique. Animals such as sea turtles and spiny lobsters use the earth's magnetic field for navigation with a fingerprinting approach that is similar to Wi-Fi fingerprinting. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of supplementing Wi-Fi fingerprinting with geomagnetic fingerprinting. Our results show that although the earth's magnetic field is not sufficient on its own to determine location, it improves the accuracy of Wi-Fi fingerprinting.