CSI-Based Probabilistic Indoor Position Determination: An Entropy Solution

Location Fingerprinting (LF) is a promising localization technique that enables enormous commercial and industrial Location-Based Services (LBS). Existing approaches either appeal to the simple Received Signal Strength (RSS), which suffers from dramatic performance degradation due to sophisticated environmental dynamics, or rely on the fine-grained physical layer Channel State Information (CSI), whose intricate structure leads to an increased computational complexity. In this paper, we adopt Autoregressive (AR) modeling based entropy of CSI amplitude as location fingerprint, which shares the structural simplicity of RSS while exploiting the most location-specific statistical channel information. On this basis, we design EntLoc, a CSI-based probabilistic indoor localization system using commercial off-the-shelf Wi-Fi devices. EntLoc is deployed in an office building covering over 200 m
²
. Extensive indoor scenario experiments corroborate that our proposed system yields superior localization accuracy over previous approaches even with only one signal transmitter.