A Kriging algorithm for location fingerprinting based on received signal strength

Received signal strength (RSS) based location fingerprinting is a powerful wireless positioning technique. It estimates the target location by consulting a preliminary database and searching for the best matched RSS fingerprints. The construction and maintenance of a sufficient fingerprint database could be laborious and problematic. This paper proposes a new approach that utilizes the Kriging spatial interpolation algorithm to build complete fingerprint databases from sparsely collected measurements. The interpolation performance is analyzed over various extents of sparsity and number of measurements. The constructed fingerprint databases are utilized to locate a static target and the localization performances are analyzed. It is shown that the Kriging algorithm can be used to build RSS fingerprint databases of good accuracy based on sparsely collected measurements.