Indoor Positioning with Radio Location Fingerprinting

An increasingly important requirement for many novel applications is sensing the positions of people, equipment, animals, etc. GPS technology has proven itself as a successfull technology for positioning in outdoor environments but indoor no technology has yet gained a similar wide-scale adoption. A promising indoor positioning technique is radio-based location fingerprinting, having the major advantage of exploiting already existing radio infrastructures, like IEEE 802.11 or GSM, which avoids extra deployment costs and effort. The research goal of this thesis is to address the limitations of current indoor location fingerprinting systems. In particular the aim is to advance location fingerprinting techniques for the challenges of handling heterogeneous clients, scalability to many clients, and interference between communication and positioning. The wireless clients used for location fingerprinting are heterogeneous even when only considering clients for the same technology. The heterogeneity is due to different radios, antennas, and firmwares causing measurements for location fingerprinting not to be directly comparable among clients. Heterogeneity is a challenge for location fingerprinting because it severely decreases the precision of location fingerprinting. To support many clients location fingerprinting has to address how to scale estimate calculation, measurement distribution, and distribution of position estimates. This is a challenge because of the number of calculations involved and the frequency of measurements and position updates. Positioning using location fingerprinting requires the measurement of, for instance, signal strength for nearby base stations. However, many wireless communication technologies block communication while collecting such measurements. This interference is a challenge because it is not desirable that positioning disables communication. In summary, this thesis contributes to methods, protocols, and techniques of location fingerprinting for addressing these challenges. An additional goal is to improve the conceptual foundation of location fingerprinting. A better foundation will aid system developers and researchers to better survey, compare, and design location fingerprinting systems.