Indoor Distance Estimation using LSTMs over WLAN Network

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS suffer from accuracy degradation and are almost unavailable in indoor environments. Indoor positioning systems (IPS) based on WiFi signals have been gaining popularity. However, owing to the strong spatial and temporal variations of wireless communication channels in the indoor environment, the achieved accuracy of existing IPS is around several tens of centimeters. We present the detailed design and implementation of a self-adaptive WiFi-based indoor distance estimation system using LSTMs. The system is novel in its method of estimating with high accuracy the distance of an object by overcoming possible causes of channel variations and is self-adaptive to the changing environmental and surrounding conditions. The proposed design has been developed and physically realized over a WiFi network consisting of ESP8266 (NodeMCU) devices. The experiments were conducted in a real indoor environment while changing the surroundings in order to establish the adaptability of the system. We compare different architectures for this task based on LSTMs, CNNs, and fully connected networks (FCNs). We show that the LSTM based model performs better among all the above-mentioned architectures by achieving an accuracy of 5.85 cm with a confidence interval of 93% on the scale of (8.46 m × 6.98 m). To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method outperforms other methods reported in the literature by a significant margin.