Title: Comparability of RF-based indoor localisation solutions in heterogeneous environments: an experimental study

Authors: Tom Van Haute; Eli De Poorter; Ingrid Moerman; Filip Lemic; Vlado Handziski; Adam Wolisz; Niklas Wirström; Thiemo Voigt

Addresses: Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University – iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8, 9050 Ghent, Belgium ' Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University – iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8, 9050 Ghent, Belgium ' Department of Information Technology (INTEC), Ghent University – iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8, 9050 Ghent, Belgium ' Telecommunication Networks Group (TKN), Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), 10587 Berlin, Germany ' Telecommunication Networks Group (TKN), Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), 10587 Berlin, Germany ' Telecommunication Networks Group (TKN), Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), 10587 Berlin, Germany ' SICS Swedish ICT, Stockholm, SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden ' SICS Swedish ICT, Stockholm, SE-164 29 Kista, Sweden

Abstract: The growing popularity of indoor localisation research has resulted in a significant amount of research papers describing and evaluating innovative localisation solutions. Unfortunately, the results from most of these research papers cannot easily be compared since they are evaluated in different environments, use different evaluation criteria and typically tailor their solutions towards a single testbed environment. To evaluate how these different conditions influence the localisation performance, in this paper an exhaustive set of experiments has been performed, in which three different localisation solutions have been evaluated using multiple metrics in three different test environments: two types of office environments and an industry-like factory environment. None of the used localisation solutions was previously optimised for any of these test environments and they were all evaluated under similar conditions. The results reveal several weaknesses in the evaluation methods used in the majority of existing scientific literature of indoor localisation solutions.

Keywords: indoor localisation; experimental comparison; benchmarking; performance metrics; fingerprinting; time of arrival; RSSI localisation; received signal strength indicator; IEEE 802.11; IEEE 802.15.4; RF technology; radio frequency; performance evaluation; office environments; factory environments.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2016.078483

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2016 Vol.23 No.1/2, pp.92 - 114

Received: 12 Sep 2014
Accepted: 05 Apr 2015
Published online: 22 Aug 2016 *

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