Trilateration Approaches for Indoor Wi-Fi Positioning

Abstract

In smartphones several sensors and receivers are embedded which enable positioning in Location-based Services and other navigation applications. They include GNSS receivers and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) cards as well as inertial sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscope and magnetometer. In this paper, indoor Wi-Fi positioning is studied based on trilateration. Three methods are investigated which are a resection, a calculation of the center of gravity point and a differential approach. The first approach is a commonly employed resection using the ranges to the Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) as radii and intersect the circles around the APs. In the second method, the center of gravity in a triangle of APs is calculated with weighting of the received signal strength (RSS) of the Wi-Fi signals. The third approach is developed by analogy to Differential GNSS (DGNSS) and therefore termed Differential Wi-Fi (DWi-Fi). Its advantage is that a real-time modeling of the temporal RSS variations and fluctuations is possible. For that purpose, reference stations realized by low-cost Raspberry Pi units are deployed which serve at the same time as APs. The experiments conducted in a laboratory and entrance of an office building showed that position deviations from the ground truth of around 2 m are achievable with the second and third method. Thereby the positioning accuracies depend mainly on the geometrical point location in the triangle of APs and reference stations and the RSS scan duration.