Indoor Positioning Using GPS Revisited

It has been considered a fact that GPS performs too poorly inside buildings to provide usable indoor positioning. We analyze results of a measurement campaign to improve on the understanding of indoor GPS reception characteristics. The results show that using state-of-the-art receivers GPS availability is good in many buildings with standard material walls and roofs. The measured root mean squared 2D positioning error was below five meters in wooden buildings and below ten meters in most of the investigated brick and concrete buildings. Lower accuracies, where observed, can be linked to either low signalto-noise ratios, multipath phenomena or bad satellite constellation geometry. We have also measured the indoor performance of embedded GPS receivers in mobile phones which provided lower availability and accuracy than state-of-the-art ones. Finally, we consider how the GPS performance within a given building is dependent on local properties like close-by building elements and materials, number of walls, number of overlaying stories and surrounding buildings.