Multi-floor pedestrian navigation service based on a hybrid indoor positioning system

With the advent of wearable and smartphone technologies, the need for pedestrian navigation services has increased over the last decade. Outdoor, the GPS remains currently the navigation standard. However, indoor navigation is in a development stage and suffers from many limitations, mainly related to the used positioning technologies and techniques and to the problem of finding the path from the origin to the destination. Previous studies have been limited to either positioning services or navigation services within a single floor building. The focus of this work is to develop a multi-floor pedestrian navigation service. This prototype is composed of two main modules. First, a positioning module, is conceived to compute the mobile unit (MU) position using the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) fingerprinting positioning techniques. Second, a navigation module, is designed to identify the rooms' numbers inside a building and to generate the graph for the whole building. The performance of our prototype is evaluated in the building IT Zentrum/International House on the campus of the University of Passau in Germany.