Experiences with Performance Tradeoffs in Practical, Continuous Indoor Localization

• Main Authors: KHAN, Azeem J., RANJAN, Vikash, LUONG, Trung-Tuan, BALAN, Rajesh Krishna, MISRA, Archan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Indoor localization; urban sensing; Buildings; Accuracy; Smart phones; Performance evaluation; Vectors; Compass; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1827; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2826/viewcontent/wowmom13_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper describes our experiences and observations with the first version of a localization system that continuous tracks the indoor location of a large number of consumer mobile devices. Unlike past work that focuses principally on the accuracy of the location tracking algorithm, we study the performance of the localization system in terms of key additional metrics: scalability and energy-efficiency, which can sometimes conflict with the desire for high accuracy. To ensure that our solution can handle both Android and iOS-based mobile devices (& other closed mobile platforms), we adapt the conventional client-side fingerprinting-based localization approaches to develop a novel and practical infrastructure-based location tracking strategy. We study the relative accuracy to the two approaches in two different types of indoor buildings. Our studies establish how the building and its occupancy characteristics affect the accuracy achievable by different algorithms, and provides insights into why accurate indoor location tracking remains a challenge in practice.