Wi-Fi Based Indoor Positioning and Navigation System (IPS/INS)

Over the last several years there has been fast growing research activities in the areas of indoor positioning, tracking, navigation, and their applications. Commercial, industrial, and retail businesses are highly motivated in developing solutions for accurate localization of assets and people. This paper first presents a brief review of the various technologies for indoor positioning applications, and then chooses one of them, the Wi-Fi RSSI based technique, for further development of a prototype application at a university campus. The algorithms that are commonly used for calculating the user’s position are also presented, including Trilateration, Fingerprinting, and the K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN). For the prototype implementation, an indoor positioning and navigation system is developed with an Android app that any user can utilize to navigate through the target indoor environment. At the end, the paper presents evaluation results of the prototype implementation, which demonstrates the effectiveness of this developed low-cost solution for indoor positioning and navigation applications.