Wireless indoor localization for heterogeneous mobile devices

Indoor positioning techniques based on the received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting outstand over other localization methods because of their independence from radio propagation models and cost effectiveness in terms of hardware and deployment requirements. However conventional RSS fingerprinting approach becomes inefficient when used for localization of heterogeneous mobile devices, where each mobile device may need an individual fingerprint database for localization purpose. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper presents a novel RSS correction approach for localization of heterogeneous devices. In this approach, during the calibration phase, the full fingerprint database is constructed only for one baseline device and the RSS difference between the new device and the baseline device is obtained based on a limited number of common reference points. During the online localization phase, such RSS difference will be used for RSS correction to localize the new device using the fingerprint database of the baseline device. Significant calibration effort is saved for the new device by avoiding setting up its full fingerprint database. Real testing results show that the proposed RSS correction strategy can improve the localization accuracy significantly from that without RSS correction.