Symposium on Challenges of Fingerprinting in Indoor Positioning and Navigation
Dates: May 3 – 4, 2016
Place: Palau Macaya, Passeig de Sant Joan, 108. Barcelona.
Geolocation systems are present in most mobile devices thanks to GNSS, of which the best known is the GPS.
Unfortunately, these systems fail when the device is inside a building.
Currently there are several mechanisms to locate within indoors using dedicated infrastructure based on different signals: infrared, radio frequency, Bluetooth, etc. Nevertheless, none of these systems has continuity outdoor-indoor; neither is as simple of use as expected, such as the ease of use of the GPS, and not even work in the smartphone.
Thus, indoor positioning faces three challenges:
- Infraestructure: the less, the better
- Easiness: easy of use
- Transparency to the user: continuity outdoor-indoor
The technique known as fingerprinting seems to solve the three challenges. This technique can use several kinds of signals as reference: Wi-Fi, Magnetic Field, or even GPS signal, among others. However, the technique has three main drawbacks:
- Low precision
- High cost in the creation of fingerprints
- Very sensible to changes in infraestructure (since it is not dedicated infraestructure)