Positioning by floors based on WiFi fingerprint

Abstract WiFi-based indoor positioning technology has gradually become a hot research topic in the field of indoor positioning, but the development of this technology has been facing the challenge of susceptibility to environmental interference. Therefore, in this paper, the kernel function method (KFM) with stronger interference resistance is used for positioning, and the adaptive σ algorithm is proposed for the time-consuming and laborious problem of manual parameter tuning, which incorporates the ideas of cross-validation and iteration. In addition, too many wireless access points (APs) mean higher computational cost and longer positioning time, so it is necessary to choose reasonable APs for positioning. In this paper, we use the random forest (RF) algorithm to assess the importance of APs and filter out a small number of APs with high importance. Considering the obvious differences in the WiFi signals received on different floors, a system framework for positioning by floors based on WiFi fingerprints is proposed. In the offline phase, the fingerprint library is first divided according to floors, and then perform separately AP selection and parameter tuning for each sub-fingerprint library. In the online phase, support vector machine is used to discriminate the floors first, and then KFM is used for planar positioning. Experiments are conducted on the public dataset, and the results show that the proposed algorithm has higher positioning accuracy, more robustness, and less time-consuming compared to several common algorithms.