A Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation of Differential Signal Strength Fingerprinting Methods

Abstract

Indoor location systems that rely on WiFi signal strength values from the existing building infrastructure deliver adequate accuracy with no installation cost at the expense of time and effort to populate the signal database. To this end, crowdsourcing has been widely explored to leverage on large volumes of user-collected data; however, mobile devices that report signal strength differently, known as device diversity, limit its applicability in practice. We consider crowdsourced location systems and present a qualitative (in terms of analytical results) and a quantitative (with respect to real-life experimental data) evaluation of several approaches that are robust to diverse devices while focusing on differential signal strength methods..