Modern WLAN Fingerprinting Indoor Positioning Methods and Deployment Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews WLAN fingerprinting indoor positioning methods, discusses deployment challenges, compares key schemes in real environments, and highlights future research directions for improving accuracy and practicality.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of WLAN fingerprinting localization, compares different schemes in real settings, and discusses deployment challenges and future opportunities.

Findings

WLAN fingerprinting achieves promising indoor localization accuracy.

Comparison of localization schemes reveals varying accuracy and complexity.

Deployment challenges impact the practical implementation of WLAN positioning.

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has become a promising choice for indoor positioning as the only existing and established infrastructure, to localize the mobile and stationary users indoors. However, since WLAN has been initially designed for wireless networking and not positioning, the localization task based on WLAN signals has several challenges. Amongst the WLAN positioning methods, WLAN fingerprinting localization has recently achieved great attention due to its promising results. WLAN fingerprinting faces several challenges and hence, in this paper, our goal is to overview these challenges and the state-of-the-art solutions. This paper consists of three main parts: 1) Conventional localization schemes; 2) State-of-the-art approaches; 3) Practical deployment challenges. Since all the proposed methods in WLAN literature have been conducted and tested in different settings, the reported results are not equally comparable. So, we compare some of the main localization schemes in a single real environment and assess their localization accuracy, positioning error statistics, and complexity. Our results depict illustrative evaluation of WLAN localization systems and guide to future improvement opportunities.