A survey of calibration-free indoor positioning systems

Last decade observed a significant research effort directed towards indoor localization utilizing location fingerprinting techniques. Fingerprinting solutions generally require a pre-deployment site survey procedure during which a radio-map is constructed by laboriously collecting signal strength samples (e.g., Wi-Fi) over the whole localization area. However, such localization efforts have certain shortcomings. For example, it is time consuming, labor intensive, vulnerable to environmental changes, and the process requires certain pedigree on the surveyor that may deem the fingerprinting techniques impractical to be deployed over large areas (e.g., shopping malls, multi-storey offices/residences, etc.). Newer emerging techniques try to bypass this expensive pre-deployment effort of fingerprinting solutions altogether. They may build the radio-map through the implicit participation of the building occupants, office employee, shoppers, visitors, etc. Apart from the traditional performance comparison criteria like accuracy, precision, robustness, scalability, algorithmic complexity based on which the localization techniques were evaluated, these newer approaches warrant some additional ones. For example, whether they require an actual geographical map of the localization area, the percentage of occasional location fix to ensure reasonable accuracy, the usage of explicit/implicit user participation to construct the radio map, the usage of building landmarks (e.g., entrance, conference room, elevator, escalator, etc.) or additional sensors (e.g., accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, etc.), whether they address device heterogeneity, etc. In this article, we survey the newer emerging fingerprinting solutions that try to relieve the pre-deployment woes. We also identify some newer performance comparison criteria based on these solutions’ inherent characteristics, and apply them together with the traditional ones in order to evaluate a number of such proposed systems.