MapSense: Mitigating Inconsistent WiFi Signals Using Signal Patterns and Pathway Map for Indoor Positioning

The indoor positioning technology plays a significant role in the scenarios of the Internet of Things which require indoor location context. In this paper, the WiFi signals under modern enterprise WiFi infrastructure, signal patterns between coexisting access points (APs), and signals’ correlation with indoor pathway map are investigated to address the problem of inconsistent WiFi signal observations. The sibling signal patterns (SSPs) are defined for the first time and processed to generate Beacon APs which have higher confidence in positioning. The spatial signal patterns are used to bring the estimated location into a limited area through signal coverage constraint (SCC). A positioning scheme using SSP and SCC is proposed and shows improved positioning accuracy. The proposed scheme is fully designed, implemented, and evaluated in a real-world environment, revealing its effectiveness and efficiency.