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Review
. 2020 Dec 17;20(24):7230.
doi: 10.3390/s20247230.

A Survey of Smartphone-Based Indoor Positioning System Using RF-Based Wireless Technologies

Santosh Subedi  1 , Jae-Young Pyun  1
Affiliations
Review

A Survey of Smartphone-Based Indoor Positioning System Using RF-Based Wireless Technologies

Santosh Subedi et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

In recent times, social and commercial interests in location-based services (LBS) are significantly increasing due to the rise in smart devices and technologies. The global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have long been employed for LBS to navigate and determine accurate and reliable location information in outdoor environments. However, the GNSS signals are too weak to penetrate buildings and unable to provide reliable indoor LBS. Hence, GNSS's incompetence in the indoor environment invites extensive research and development of an indoor positioning system (IPS). Various technologies and techniques have been studied for IPS development. This paper provides an overview of the available smartphone-based indoor localization solutions that rely on radio frequency technologies. As fingerprinting localization is mostly accepted for IPS development owing to its good localization accuracy, we discuss fingerprinting localization in detail. In particular, our analysis is more focused on practical IPS that are realized using a smartphone and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) as a signal source. Furthermore, we elaborate on the challenges of practical IPS, the available solutions and comprehensive performance comparison, and present some future trends in IPS development.

Keywords: Bluetooth low energy; Wi-Fi; fingerprinting localization; indoor positioning system; performance metrics; positioning algorithms.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Categorization of major technologies used in indoor positioning system (IPS) development.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Localization based on time of arrival (TOA) measurement.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Localization based on time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurement.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Localization based on angle of arrival (AOA) measurement.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The fine timing measurement (FTM) protocol.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Graphical representation of interference at indoor environment.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Variation of Wi-Fi and BLE RSS at a fixed indoor environment.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Graphical representation of proximity-based IPS.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Procedure for estimating weighted centroid (WC) localization at a tag device.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Triangulation localization using two known APs and AOA.
Figure 11
Figure 11
The working procedure of typical fingerprinting localization.
Figure 12
Figure 12
A typical architecture of multilayer perception (MLP).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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