Offsite Evaluation of Localization Systems: Criteria, Systems, and Results From IPIN 2021 and 2022 Competitions

Indoor positioning is a thriving research area, which is slowly gaining market momentum. Its applications are mostly customized, ad hoc installations; ubiquitous applications analogous to Global Navigation Satellite System for outdoors are not available because of the lack of generic platforms, widely accepted standards and interoperability protocols. In this context, the indoor positioning and indoor navigation (IPIN) competition is the only long-term, technically sound initiative to monitor the state of the art of real systems by measuring their performance in a realistic environment. Most competing systems are pedestrian-oriented and based on the use of smartphones, but several competing tracks were set up, enabling comparison of an array of technologies. The two IPIN competitions described here include only off-site tracks. In contrast with on-site tracks where competitors bring their systems on-site—which were impossible to organize during 2021 and 2022—in off-site tracks competitors download prerecorded data from multiple sensors and process them using the EvaalAPI, a real-time, web-based emulation interface. As usual with IPIN competitions, tracks were compliant with the EvAAL framework, ensuring consistency of the measurement procedure and reliability of results. The main contribution of this work is to show a compilation of possible indoor positioning scenarios and different indoor positioning solutions to the same problem.