An experimental comparison study on indoor localization: RF fingerprinting and Multilateration methods

Due to an increasing number of public and private access points in indoor and urban environments, Wi-Fi positioning becomes more and more attractive. In last ten years different approaches and solutions have been developed and applied. The accuracy of these systems depends on the suitability of the propagation models used for the actual propagation conditions. In this paper, characteristic and analysis of two popular methods for indoor localization named as K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN) algorithm based RF Fingerprinting and RF Multilateration methods are experimentally evaluated and compared according to received signal strength (RSS) of a mobile Wi-Fi user for getting a better and improved result. Transmitted signal strengths of four fixed Wi-Fi modems are measured by using a mobile Mac Computer with Wi-Fi receiver in the School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering hallways at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. Later, accuracy plots and modelling for better solution in small areas and LoS locations has been demonstrated for both methods. An experimental comparison results has been presented to evaluate the performance in localizing accuracy where RF Fingerprinting method shows better results than RF multilateration method while RF multilateration method offers less error rate and better solution for small areas.