Indoors Smartphone Positioning Enhancement Using Wi-Fi and Magnetometer

Authors

Runahi F. Qadir, Department of software Engineering, College of Engineering, Koya University, Koya, Erbil, Kurdistan Region, IraqFollow
Halgurd S. Maghdid, Department of Software Engineering, College of Engineering, Koya University,Koya, Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq
Azhin T. Sabir

Corresponding Author

RunahiF. Qadir

Document Type

Research Article

Abstract

Recent embedded technologies on today’s smartphone make the smartphones more comfortable to run a large number of applications which are used for people’s daily activities. Among all these applications, the location-based services (LBS) are frequently used. The LBS applications utilized location information via Smartphones technologies. For example, when outdoors, Global Navigation System (GPS) or generally Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals are used to retrieve the location information within enough positioning accuracy. However, when smartphone holders are entering to the urbane area or indoors, the performance of GPS service will be degraded or sometime cannot retrieve location information due to blocking the GPS signals through the roofs or walls of the buildings. Beside this, many onboard smartphones wireless chipsets or sensors’ readings can be used as alternate technologies to provide location information including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, and inertial sensors. However, these technologies during positioning process will faced its own limitations such as: none-line-of-sight signals, multipath signals, and sensor drift or accumulated error. For these reasons, it is very difficult to provide a good positioning accuracy, when only a single technology is utilized alone. Therefore, this study proposes a new positioning solution based on hybridize two different technologies measurements including received signal strength (RSS) of the Wi-Fi access points and onboard smartphone magnetometer readings within fingerprinting positioning technique. The hybridization of these technologies is based on taking their advantaged and mitigating their drawbacks. In addition to that, this study also provided an improved version of matching algorithm of the fingerprinting technique by applying the concept of boosting-dataset records. A set of real trial experiments are conducted to prove the validity of the proposed solution. The obtained results of the experiments show that the proposed positioning solution can provide an enough positioning accuracy, up to 0.13 meter.

Keywords

Hybrid positioning, Embedded Smartphone technologies; Fingerprinting Positioning; Magnetometer Sensor; Wi-Fi Access-Point Signal

How to Cite This Article

Qadir, Runahi F.; Maghdid, Halgurd S.; and Sabir, Azhin T. (2023) "Indoors Smartphone Positioning Enhancement Using Wi-Fi and Magnetometer," Polytechnic Journal: Vol. 13: Iss. 1, Article 13.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59341/2707-7799.1737

References

ALI, M. U., HUR, S. & PARK, Y. J. S. 2019a. WiFi-based effortless indoor positioning system using IoT sensors. 19, 1496.

ALI, W. H., KAREEM, A. A. & JASIM, M. J. C. U.-E. S. J. 2019b. Survey on wireless indoor positioning systems. 3, 42-47.

ASHRAF, I., HUR, S. & PARK, Y. J. S. 2019. Indoor positioning on disparate commercial smartphones using Wi-Fi access points coverage area. 19, 4351.

ASHRAF, I., ZIKRIA, Y. B., HUR, S. & PARK, Y. J. I. A. 2020. A Comprehensive Analysis of Magnetic Field Based Indoor Positioning With Smartphones: Opportunities, Challenges and Practical Limitations. 8, 228548-228571.

DARI, Y. E., SUYOTO, S. & PRANOWO, P. J. I. J. I. M. T. 2018. CAPTURE: A Mobile Based Indoor Positioning System using Wireless Indoor Positioning System. 12, 61- 72.

GOZICK, B., SUBBU, K. P., DANTU, R., MAESHIRO, T. J. I. T. O. I. & MEASUREMENT 2011. Magnetic maps for indoor navigation. 60, 3883-3891.

HANLEY, D., DE OLIVEIRA, A. S. D., ZHANG, X., KIM, D. H., WEI, Y., BRETL, T. J. I. T. O. I. & MEASUREMENT 2021. The impact of height on indoor positioning with magnetic fields. 70, 1-19.

HOSSEINI, K. S., AZADDEL, M. H., NOURIAN, M. A. & AZIRANI, A. A. Improving Multifloor WiFi-based Indoor positioning systems by Fingerprint grouping. 2021 5th International Conference on Internet of Things and Applications (IoT), 2021. IEEE, 1-6.

KESER, S. B., YAZICI, A. & GÜNAL, S. J. M. I. S. 2018. An F-Score-Weighted Indoor Positioning Algorithm Integrating WiFi and Magnetic Field Fingerprints. 2018, 7950985:1-7950985:8.

KUANG, J., LI, T. & NIU, X. J. I. S. J. 2021. Magnetometer bias insensitive magnetic field matching based on pedestrian dead reckoning for smartphone indoor positioning.

MENDOZA-SILVA, G. M., RICHTER, P., TORRES-SOSPEDRA, J., LOHAN, E. S. & HUERTA, J. J. D. 2018. Long-term WiFi fingerprinting dataset for research on robust indoor positioning. 3, 3.

NINH, D. B., HE, J., TRUNG, V. T. & HUY, D. P. J. F. G. C. S. 2020. An effective random statistical method for Indoor Positioning System using WiFi fingerprinting. 109, 238- 248.

PÉREZ-NAVARRO, A., TORRES-SOSPEDRA, J., MONTOLIU, R., CONESA, J., BERKVENS, R., CASO, G., COSTA, C., DORIGATTI, N., HERNÁNDEZ, N. & KNAUTH, S. 2019. Challenges of fingerprinting in indoor positioning and navigation. Geographical and Fingerprinting Data to Create Systems for Indoor Positioning and Indoor/Outdoor Navigation. Elsevier.

SHAHIDI, S. & VALAEE, S. GIPSy: Geomagnetic indoor positioning system for smartphones. 2015 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 2015. IEEE, 1-7.

YEH, S.-C., HSU, W.-H., LIN, W.-Y., WU, Y.-F. J. I. T. O. I. & MEASUREMENT 2019. Study on an indoor positioning system using Earth’s magnetic field. 69, 865-872.

YU, J., NA, Z., LIU, X., DENG, Z. J. E. J. O. W. C. & NETWORKING 2019. WiFi/PDRintegrated indoor localization using unconstrained smartphones. 2019, 1-13.

Publication Date

9-1-2023