Radio-Frequency Handoff Strategies to Seamlessly Integrate Indoor Localization Systems

The widespread use of Location Based Services (LBS) drives the pervasive adoption of localization systems available anywhere. Environments equipped with multiple indoor localization systems (ILSs), require managing the transition from one ILS to another in order to continue localizing the user’s device even when moving indoors or outdoor-to-indoor environments. In this paper, we focus on the handoff procedure, whose goal is enabling a device to trigger the transition between ILSs when specific conditions are verified. We describe the activation of handoff procedures by considering three types of ILS design and deployment, each with increasing complexity. Moreover, this work defines three handoff algorithms based on the proximity detection, and we test them in a realistic environment characterized by two contiguous ILSs.