Indoor Localization System for Seamless Tracking Across Buildings and Network Configurations

WiFi localization systems have become increasingly popular owing to the ubiquity of WiFi-enabled devices. However, traditional WiFi networks were not originally designed for localization purposes, and changes to the Access Point locations can significantly drop localization performance. Moreover, these systems are unable to generalize models trained in one building to other buildings due to dependencies on building characteristics and their WiFi configurations. To address this challenge, we propose GlobLoc: the first global indoor positioning system that can function in any environment in a plug-and-play manner without requiring recalibration. Towards this end, we introduce a novel concept called the “virtual environment” in which users are tracked rather than the physical counterpart. This enables the localization model trained on one environment to function in another, regardless of changes occurring in the network environment, as they share the same virtual environment. Our experiments demonstrate that GlobLoc outperforms existing state-of-the-art propagation- and fingerprinting-based systems by at least 65%. This superior accuracy is due to its robustness to changes in the WiFi environment and its adaptability to different building configurations.