HILL: A Hybrid Indoor Localization Scheme

Abstract

Localization is a fundamental operation in wireless networks. Location determination is normally accomplished using the Global Positioning System (GPS) for outdoor applications. For indoor localization, GPS does not work due to the lack of the line of sight to satellites. High-precision indoor localization is critical to many personal and business applications. WiFi-based indoor localization was proposed to be a practical method to locate WiFi-enabled devices due to the popularity of WiFi networks. However, it suffers from large localization errors. Our experimental results indicate that this scheme consistently leads to an average error around 3 meters. The existence of different locations with similar WiFi signal strength is the reason behind the large errors. To improve the localization precision, a hybrid indoor localization scheme, HILL, is proposed in this paper. Inspired by the fact that a large number of WiFi-enabled mobile devices have been deployed, HILL uses 3 phases to improve the precision of WiFi-based localization. First of all, it measures the distances between each pair of peer devices through acoustic ranging. Secondly, the Classical Metric Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) method is applied to the collected distances, which results in a graph consistent with the distances. Finally, the graph generated by MDS is embedded onto the graph corresponding to WiFi-based localization in order to achieve high localization precision. Our experimental results indicate that the average localization error of HILL is about 1 meter.