A novel indoor localization method based on virtual AP estimation

Indoor localization is important to many location based applications and services. Many indoor localization methods have been proposed and they can be roughly categorized into two groups: One is based on the distance estimation between a target point and the Access Points (APs); and the other is based on the Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint map. However, the two approaches all assume that the locations of Access Points (APs) are known beforehand. In this paper, we consider a scenario that the locations of APs are not known, and we use measured RSS (Received Signal Strength) at some location-known reference points and their geographical information to estimate virtual APs´ parameters. Then those parameters are used to locate new user by optimization method. Experiments show that the position accuracy of the proposed method approaches that of RADAR with less effort.