WiFi RSS fingerprinting indoor localization for mobile devices

While WiFi-based indoor localization is attractive, the need for a significant degree of pre-deployment effort is a key challenge. In this paper, indoor localization with no pre-deployment effort in an indoor space, such as an office building corridor, with WiFi coverage but no a priori knowledge of the placement of the access points(APs) is implemented for mobile devices. WiFi Received Signal Strength(RSS) in the considered environment is used to build radio maps using WiFi fingerprinting approach. An offline RSS fingerprint of the environment is compared with an online RSS measurement to estimate the location of a user. Two architectures are developed based on this localization algorithm. The first one involves a client-server approach where the localization algorithm runs on the server whereas the second one is a standalone architecture and the algorithm runs on the SD card of the mobile device. Experimental results in the considered environment validate the approach for both architectures.