Impact of Building Environment on the Performance of Dynamic Indoor Localization

Location determination of mobile users within a building is challenging due to the complexities of the indoor radio propagation characteristics. For a RF based indoor system, a common practice is to construct a signal strength map table showing the radio signal strength at different known locations in the building. A mobile user's location at an arbitrary point in the building is then determined by measuring the signal strength at the location in question and determining the location by referring to the above map table using a LMSE (least mean square error) criterion. Much work has been done lately in the indoor radio propagation in order to automatically generate the signal strength map table according to the changing environment. This research is based on the ARIADNE indoor localization system with the purpose to analyze the impact of building structures and indoor furniture on the performance of the indoor localization. We provide a simple strategy to model these indoor structures, and we verify the methodology using a complex basement building. Experimental results indicate that up to 15% improvement in location estimation is achievable from the proposed method.