Indoor Positioning by Double Deep Q-Network in VLC-Based Empty Office Environment

Abstract

Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied in various industries. One such application is indoor user positioning using Big Data. The traditional method for positioning is the global positioning system (GPS). However, the performance of GPS is limited indoors due to propagation loss. Hence, radio frequency (RF)-based communication methods such as WiFi and Bluetooth have been proposed as indoor positioning solutions. However, positioning performance inaccuracies arise due to signal interference caused by RF band saturation. Therefore, this study proposes indoor user positioning based on visible light communication (VLC). The proposed method involves the sequential application of fingerprinting and double deep Q-Network. Fingerprinting is utilized to define the action and state of the double deep Q-Network agent. The agent is designed to learn and locate the reference point (RP) closest to the user’s position in a shorter search time. The core idea of the proposed system is to converge a Cell-ID scheme and fingerprinting. Through this, the initial state of the double deep Q-Network agent can be limited. A limited initial state can increase the positioning speed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme attains a positioning resolution of less than 13 cm and achieves a processing time of less than 0.03 s to obtain the final position in VLC-based office environments.