LOCALI: Calibration-Free Systematic Localization Approach for Indoor Positioning

Recent advancements in indoor positioning systems are based on infrastructure-free solutions, aimed at improving the location accuracy in complex indoor environments without the use of specialized resources. A popular infrastructure-free solution for indoor positioning is a calibration-based positioning, commonly known as fingerprinting. Fingerprinting solutions require extensive and error-free surveys of environments to build radio-map databases, which play a key role in position estimation. Fingerprinting also requires random updates of the database, when there are significant changes in the environment or a decrease in the accuracy. The calibration of the fingerprinting database is a time-consuming and laborious effort that prevents the extensive adoption of this technique. In this paper, we present a systematic LOCALIzation approach, "LOCALI", for indoor positioning, which does not require a calibration database and extensive updates. The LOCALI exploits the floor plan/wall map of the environment to estimate the target position by generating radio maps by integrating path-losses over certain trajectories in complex indoor environments, where triangulation using time information or the received signal strength level is highly erroneous due to the fading effects caused by multi-path propagation or absorption by environmental elements or varying antenna alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that by using the map information and environmental parameters, a significant level of accuracy in indoor positioning can be achieved. Moreover, this process requires considerably lesser effort compared to the calibration-based techniques.