Overview of received signal strength based fingerprinting localization in indoor wireless LAN environments

In recent years, indoor localization technique is anticipated to play an increasingly important role in our society. In general, the indoor localization techniques include trilateral, triangulation and fingerprinting localization. As an important alternative, fingerprinting localization techniques are extensively studied and applied in the existing localization systems. This paper presents an overview of the fingerprinting localization system based on the received signal strength (RSS) in indoor wireless LAN (WLAN) environments. In particular, we describe the structure of localization system and then analyze the challenges that most existing research works try to deal with. Corresponding solutions and several pattern matching algorithms are also presented. Furthermore, we demonstrate a comparative study of existing fingerprinting localization systems and address the possible directions of future research in indoor localization techniques.