A novel technique for human traffic based radio map updating in Wi-Fi indoor positioning systems

With the fast-developing of mobile terminals, positioning techniques based on fingerprinting method draws attention from many researchers even world famous companies. To conquer some shortcomings of the existing fingerprinting systems and further improve its performance, we propose a radio map building and updating technique, which is able to customize the spatial and temporal dependency of radio maps. The method includes indoor propagation and penetration modeling and the analysis of human traffic. Based on the combination of Ray-Tracing Algorithm, Finite-Different Time-Domain and Rough Set Theory, the approach of indoor propagation modeling accurately represents the spatial dependency of the radio map. In terms of temporal dependency, we specifically study the factor of moving people in the interest area. With measurement and statistics, the factor of human traffic is introduced as the temporal updating component. We improve our existing indoor positioning system with the proposed building and updating method, and compare the localization accuracy. The results show that the enhanced system can conquer the influence caused by moving people, and maintain the confidence probability stable during week, which enhance the actual availability and robustness of fingerprinting-based indoor positioning system.