Indoor Wi-Fi positioning: techniques and systems

If outdoor positioning is widely treated and quite precise, positioning indoors or, more generally, in heterogeneous environments, as well as mobility prediction, requires important devices. New wireless technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi, Ultra Wide Band) combine the mobility of terminals with large bandwidth. Terminal mobility is one of the major pillars of applications attempting to become context-aware, and a large bandwidth enables new services such as multimedia contents streaming towards mobile terminals. Being context-aware and able to provide services in a mobile environment requires the knowledge of spatial and temporal data about the terminal. The key phase in the achievement of mobility management is the positioning process. We propose a layered positioning system based on a model combining a reference point-based approach with a trilateration-based one. Several layers of refinement are offered based on the knowledge of the topology and devices deployed. The more data are known, the better adapted to its area the positioning system can be.