Efficient survey database construction using location fingerprinting interpolation

A critical problem with location fingerprinting is the considerable time and effort spent measuring received signal strengths at all location candidates to create the survey database. To reduce this cost, existing methods use a signal path loss model to interpolate part of the survey database from data actually measured at location candidates. However, the positioning accuracy can become degraded, especially in an indoor area delimited by walls. In this paper, we confirm the degradation in accuracy of the existing method through a preliminary experiment, and propose an accurate interpolation method for survey databases. In the proposed method, part of the survey data is interpolated using a path loss model containing wall attenuation. Furthermore, to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, we evaluate the location estimation performance with the interpolated survey database and also verify the interpolated data. The proposed method improves the positioning accuracy by 25% over that of the existing method.