Ubiquitous Indoor Fine-Grained Positioning and Tracking: A Channel Response Perspective

TL;DR

This paper reviews and benchmarks channel response-based indoor positioning methods, highlighting their potential for low-cost, fine-grained location tracking using ubiquitous IoT devices, and discusses practical challenges and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview, classification, and micro-benchmark of channel response-based localization techniques, and discusses real-world application issues and research opportunities.

Findings

Channel response enables fine-grained indoor positioning.

Device-based and contact-free schemes are complementary.

Practical deployment challenges are identified.

Abstract

The future of location-aided applications is shaped by the ubiquity of Internet-of-Things devices. As an increasing amount of commercial off-the-shelf radio devices support channel response collection, it is possible to achieve fine-grained position estimation at a relatively low cost. In this paper, we focus on the channel response-based positioning and tracking for various applications. We first give an overview of the state of the art (SOTA) of channel response-enabled localization, which is further classified into two categories, i.e., device-based and contact-free schemes. A taxonomy for these complementary approaches is provided concerning the involved techniques. Then, we present a micro-benchmark of channel response-based direct positioning and tracking for both device-based and contact-free schemes. Finally, some practical issues for real-world applications and future research opportunities are pointed out.