A Comparative Performance Evaluation of Indoor Geolocation Technologies

As more location aware services are emerging in the market, the needs for accurate and reliable localization has increased and in response to this need a number of technologies and associated algorithms are introduced in the literature. Severe multipath fading in indoor areas, poses a challenging environment for accurate localization. In this article we provide a comprehensive overview of existing indoor localization techniques. We address the bandwidth requirement, advantages and disadvantages of received-signal-strength (RSS) and time-of-arrival (TOA) based localization algorithms. We describe a repeatable framework for comparative performance evaluation of localization algorithms. Using this framework we compare the performances of two TOA-based and two RSS-based algorithms. The TOA-based algorithms are the least square TOA (LS-TOA) and closest neighbor with TOA grid (CN-TOAG). The RSS-based algorithms are the maximum likelihood estimator and the recently introduced ray tracing assisted closest neighbor (RT-CN).