Utilization of room-to-room transition time in Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor localization

In indoor localization applications, many different methods have been proposed to increase positioning accuracy. Among these methods, fingerprint-based techniques are generally preferred because they use existing resources such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM signals, etc., and can be implemented on commonly used devices such as mobile phones. In this paper, we evaluate different Wi-Fi fingerprint-based methods on two datasets (with and without room-to-room transition features) created from the same environment, and we investigate the impact of room-to-room transition features on classification performance. To the best of our knowledge, transition time between rooms has not been used in past studies on fingerprint-based indoor localization. This information is of significant importance, due to the physical distance between rooms. Therefore, in this study source room and transition time to a target room have been included as features in addition to signal sources and signal strength values in the target room. From preliminary experimental results we observed that the transition time between rooms increases the performance of all tested positioning algorithms, with the Back-propagation classifier showing the best performance increase (13%).