Cross device fingerprint-based positioning using 3D Ray Tracing

Abstract

This work proposes the use of 3D Ray Tracing (RT) to construct radiomaps for WLAN Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint-based positioning, in conjunction with calibration techniques to tackle with the problem using different devices. In addition to the fact that RSS data collection might be a tedious and time-consuming process, the measured radiomap accuracy and applicability is subject to potential changes in the wireless environment. Therefore, RT becomes a very suitable and efficient solution to tackle this problem. Moreover, in traditional fingerprint-based methods, the underlying radiomap is restricted to the mobile device for which the radiomap has been created. To overcome this limitation, we propose the use of linear data transformation to match the characteristics of various devices. We address both challenges by using 3D RT-generated radiomaps and highlight the efficiency of this approach in terms of the time spent to create the radiomap, the amount of data required to calibrate the radiomap for different devices and the positioning error which is compared against the case of using dedicated radiomaps collected with each device.