A theoretical analysis of wireless localization using RF-based fingerprint matching

Accurately obtaining the position of mobile devices is critical to high-level applications. In indoor environments, localization approaches employing RF-based fingerprint matching is an active research area because it can reuse the existing communication infrastructure, as well as reduce the signal uncertainty to achieve better location accuracy. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of the localization performance when using fingerprint matching schemes. Specifically, we derived an analytic expression for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the location error and investigated the mathematical relationship between the location error and the sampling points. Particularly, we studied the effects of the number of sampling points and the distance between adjacent sampling points. We further conducted experiments using an 802.11 network in a real office building environment. Our performance evaluation provides strong evidence that theoretical analysis is effective as the experimental results match our analytic study very well.