Temperature-Aided Fingerprinting for localization in wireless local area networks

Abstract

Wireless signal fingerprints have been used to localize mobile devices in recent years. Especially, WLAN signals are of great importance, because of the ubiquity of WLAN infrastructure. In this paper, the possibility of correlation between temperature and signal strength is investigated to improve the traditional fingerprinting method by incorporating the temperature into the process. The new approach is called the Temperature-Aided Fingerprinting (TAF) and even with current WLAN-enabled devices, which usually do not have a thermometer, TAF achieves a better performance than the traditional method. At the end, we open up a hypothesis that the observed difference is not caused by the temperature, rather by the crowdedness and the dynamics of the environment. This is left to be investigated in the future.