Indoor localisation using existing WiFi infrastructure — A case study at a university building

Location is an important context in everyday activity. Outdoor positioning, through the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS), has been a mature technology. Indoor localisation, on the other hand, is still an active research area. While many popular techniques utilise new specialised, dedicated devices to enable precise indoor positioning, our investigation aims to solve the indoor localisation problem by using only existing WiFi infrastructure and commercially-off-the-shelf (COTS) smartphones. Based on the algorithm from previous investigations, a case study was carried out at a typical university building. Location clusters were generated using WiFi information collected using a COTS smartphones. Fingerprints were then formed from the generated clusters. Two evaluations have been carried to perform the comparisons. This paper discusses the obtained results, observations and issues faced in the case study.