Methods for Indoor Location and Navigation using Mobile Phones

Brett Ausmeier

Abstract
This paper looks at several possible methods for indoor location and navigation using mobile phones. It considers their feasibility in the context of a business environment by taking into account factors including: accuracy, simplicity in both use and deployment, and cost to set up and maintain. The process involved in implementing each one is discussed, and the methods are compared individually as well as in conjunction with one another in order to find a solution which is most appropriate.

The interest of this research is to design a system which can be used by consultants to navigate their way around the premises of the company for which they are consulting, using only the features on their mobile phone. On the first visit to one of these companies a consultant will be able to map out the layout of the buildings and mark certain points of interest which could be needed in future. Once this has been done anyone who requires to find their way around one of these buildings will simply be able to enter the point of interest which they wish to navigate to, and the system will accurately lead them there by finding their location and tracking it in real-time.

Introduction
The topic to be discussed by this paper is indoor location and navigation using mobile phones. It involves finding the position of a user and tracking their location based on data gathered from the sensors on a mobile phone. Owing to the indoor nature of this topic it can be assumed that the use of a Global Positioning System (GPS) is not possible, and other technologies will need to be discussed which could be used to find a mobile devices location without the use of this. The features available for consideration in this paper include any which are currently available on mobile phones at the moment. These include accelerometers, cameras, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The accuracy and feasibility of these technologies will be considered both individually as well as in conjunction with one another. By comparing the combinations the hope is to find an accurate and affordable method for indoor navigation using a mobile device.

Indoor Mobile Location

There is currently a lot of interest in applications and services which use information about a persons location either to tailor the content provided to them, or in the social networking context to share this information with friends (e.g. Foursquare). If this location information is improved it could be further exploited and many new opportunities would emerge.

Possible approaches
Wireless Localization
Signal strength of Wi-Fi and Radio Frequency (RF) networks can be used to determine a mobile devices location by means of triangulation and signal propagation (Bahl and Padmanabhan 2002). There are several approaches which have different complexities and accuracies. Triangulation of a users location can be done using readings from several wireless 1

transmitters. With at least 2 wireless stations (Bahl and Padmanabhan 2002), it is possible to work out an approximate position of a user based on distances and angles between transmitters. Propagation models or radio maps store signal strength information based on values received from wireless access points in an area. They can be made using theoretical-computation or by taking actual signal strength readings of an area and recording them. War-driving or war-walking is a method of doing this which involves going through an area and searching for wireless networks using some wireless device to determine their signal strength (Constandache, Choudhury and Rhee 2010). Once these maps have been created the location of a user can be found by taking signal strength readings from nearby wireless transmitters, and finding the best match for these on the radio maps. Using Wi-Fi networks for localization relies on the assumption that there are already existing transmitters in the area of interest. If this is not the case then they need to be set up but this can prove to be very costly and infeasible. There are some issues with the accuracy of wireless location methods. Signal strength in some buildings can be inconsistent as quality of readings suffers with wall attenuation (Bahl and Padmanabhan 2002). Inconsistencies can also be introduced by factors as arbitrary as the weather on a particular day (Elias and Elnahas 2007), or people moving about a building (Youssef and Agrawala 2005). Even with these issues however, some mathematical modeling can improve this accuracy to within 2 to 3 meters (Bahl and Padmanabhan 2002).

room. This setup is undesirable, but is cheaper than setting up Wi-Fi transmitters as mentioned above (Madhavapeddy and Tse 2005), and thus preferable to that alternative. Location of a user is calculated by finding proximity to the Bluetooth transmitters. If a transmitter is visible to the phone this suggests that the distance to this transmitter is less than 10 meters (Lin, et al. 2010). This information can narrow down the location of the device to a single room, or a small area. When a single reading is not accurate enough to isolate the user to a single room, proximity to other transmitters can be found and used to narrow down the location. Even with this improvement however, this technology is good at determining general location, but does not provide exact location of a device. In addition to this the energy cost of frequent Bluetooth queries is high (Lin, et al. 2010), which makes this approach somewhat less feasible.

RFID
This technology consists of two components RFID tags and RFID readers. The tags can either be active in which case they create a signal that can be read at some distance by a reader, or passive in which case they simply reflect the signals transmitted to them. Active tags are costly and require a battery to power them, whilst passive tags are cheap and can stand alone. (Ni, et al. 2004) One option for the setup of the RFID system would be to deploy several RFID readers throughout the building and have the user carry a small RFID tag with them. The problem with this is the cost associated with setting up a number of readers. Instead a second option would be to place tags throughout the building and have the user carry a reader which can be used to gather information from these tags. In terms of cost this is the preferred method (Candy 2007).

Bluetooth Localization
Bluetooth vicinity localization capitalizes on the short range of Bluetooth devices to determine which room or area a user is in. It requires Bluetooth transmitters to be set up throughout the building, ideally with one transmitter in each 2

In the case of indoor location passive tags are more suitable. Their low cost means that many of these tags can be placed throughout the building, offering the user more uniform location information than a few active tags could provide (Candy 2007). In order to use RFID for navigation, the user would need some device capable of acting as an RFID reader. A few mobile phones currently have built in RFID readers, however this is not a common feature. Instead devices are available which can be used along with the mobile phone to read RFID signals and send them to the phone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi (Ni, et al. 2004). A user walking around a building would be able to take a reading from a nearby RFID tag at any time to locate themselves within the building. In order to take these readings the user would simply have to touch the back of the RFID reader against the tag to gather the information stored by it (Candy 2007). The reason for this required touch is the short range offered by cheap RFID readers such as the ones found within mobile phones. If a more expensive, higher quality reader were to be used the range at which readings could be taken would be larger (Ni, et al. 2004). With the information gathered from the tags software would be able to locate the user and provide them with instructions to navigate to their desired destination. If at any point the user was unsure of where to go they could simply take another reading from a nearby tag and the instructions could be updated.

features encompasses noticeable shapes such as edges, corners and junctions (Elias and Elnahas 2007). In order to have a database of images to match images with, a large amount of set up is required when a building is mapped out for the first time. The accuracy of the image matching depends largely on the creation of a complete database of location images. Multiple pictures need to be taken of each point of interest to account for variations in lighting and angle (Ravi, et al. 2006). This means that a large amount of memory is needed to store the images, which becomes problematic in the context of mobile phones and their limited storage space. An alternative and perhaps more viable option than on-device storage is to store the database on some server which can be accessed by the device (Ravi, et al. 2006). This approach also addresses another issue which is the high computational cost of image processing which amounts to high energy usage and reduced battery life of the mobile device. If the client-server model is used processing can be done on the server side which reduces the amount of work done by the device, thus increasing its battery life. The down side of this however is the amount of communication required between the mobile phone and the server. The cost of bandwidth on a mobile device can be high which may make this approach to expensive to maintain. To reduce the complexity of the image matching physical objects could be tagged with visual codes such as QR barcodes to make recognition simpler. This would mean that a simple barcode reader found on many phones, rather than a complex image processing algorithm, could be used to find the location of the device. Both speed and energy efficiency would be improved, however this approach requires the placement of these visual tags throughout the building which may not be desirable or possible.

Image Matching
Owing to the fact that almost every mobile phone currently has a built in camera, image matching is a very opportunistic approach to solving the problem of indoor location. The general method for doing this involves identifying the features of an image and comparing these features to similar ones in a database of saved images. The term 3

Tracking of a person by image matching is not continuous, but rather done in intervals. This can be a problem if a user makes a sudden change in direction which may put off any prediction being done by the device, but it can also be used in a positive manner. Frequency of the photos being taken could be automatically adjusted according to predictions and readings taken from other features of the mobile device (Ravi, et al. 2006). For instance when walking down a passage little recognition is required, however when turning a corner or entering a new room it is important that the location of the user is found and updated. By reducing the number of image comparisons being done both the energy and bandwidth costs could be reduced. Another benefit of image matching is that it can be used to determine the orientation of the mobile device (Elias and Elnahas 2007). This does not benefit the image matching approach very much, but if this were to be used alongside some other method for indoor location it may prove very useful.

it may be possible to narrow down the position of a person to such a room. Ambient fingerprinting is good for identifying setting, but not so much for location as it finds logical location rather than physical location of a user (Azizyan, Constandache and Choudhury 2009). Individually it is of little use, but coupled with other location methods it can be very successful. Bluetooth vicinity localization in particular could combine well with ambient fingerprinting because of the general location it provides.

Pedometers
A pedometer system which measures the distance that has been walked by a user can be developed using the accelerometer found in some mobile phones. It works by measuring the acceleration of the device and isolating the up and down movements to determine the number of steps which have been taken. The number of steps is then multiplied by the approximate distance of each step to calculate the total distance walked (Cho, et al. 2010). The problem with a pedometer system is accuracy. Most pedometers use a constant stride length to work out the distance travelled and while this can be accurate for a moderate walking pace, a faster or slower pace can cause error in the estimation. This means that a more accurate method for measurement needs to be found for different walking paces. A system proposed by (Cho, et al. 2010) exploits a linear relationship between step frequency and stride length to account for varying walking speed. The linear values specific to a user are calculated by taking readings when the device has access to GPS coverage. These readings along with those taken by the pedometer system can be compared and synchronized by working out the relationship between the stride length and frequency. Using this method of calibration an accuracy of more than 98 percent can be achieved in measuring distance walked (Cho, et al. 2010). 4

Ambient fingerprinting
The accuracy of a location system cannot always be guaranteed. Often the best achievable accuracy is a general physical location, for example a GPS coordinate within a five meter radius, or a Bluetooth vicinity location. This is not always good enough as this general area may overlap several rooms and we often need to narrow this down. All rooms have several ambient features associated with them such as sound, lighting and nature of movement within them. Ambient fingerprinting takes into account all of these and produces a single fingerprint which can be used to distinguish a particular room from others (Azizyan, Constandache and Choudhury 2009). For instance a computer lab has the ambient sound of computers, and the usual nature of movement is for a user to be static, sitting in front of a computer. By creating a fingerprint from this

Knowing how far a user has walked by itself is not entirely useful, but simple gyroscopes and compasses found in most mobile phones can be used to determine orientation and thus determine a path rather than just a distance which has been travelled (Constandache, Choudhury and Rhee 2010). Even with this path however it is not possible to know the location of the user unless the path can be related to a point of reference. One option is to find the location of a user before tracking their path so that their position at any time can be found relative to the starting point. In order to find this initial position one of the technologies above could be used for example an RFID chip at the entrance to a building which provides the device with some point of reference from which the location can be tracked. A second option is to match the approximately measured path to known paths in the area. This involves pre-computation to map out the common paths walked by people. The general location of the device can be found using broad location methods such as GSM location using signal tower triangulation. Following this, when a user is walking around, the path they take can be recorded, and their location narrowed down by comparing and matching the approximate readings with the known paths (Constandache, Choudhury and Rhee 2010).

Accuracy Wireless Bluetooth RFID Image Matching Ambient Fingerprinting Pedometers

Energy Efficiency Low - mid Low High Mid Mid Mid - high

Setup Cost

2 to 3 meters 10 meters Within cm Several meters Room level 98%

High - if not existing High Moderate Low Low Low

Whilst the table seems to clearly favour certain methods it does not take into account the complexity of implementation. Many of these values are best-case results and are not easily attainable in all situations. Based on the table the best two approaches appear to be RFID and pedometers: The RFID method provides high accuracy and energy efficiency, but it requires the placement of tags throughout the desired navigation area which is not ideal for deployment in the context of the business environment. It also lacks automation as it requires the user to manually scan a tag to find their location. The pedometer method offers good accuracy and energy efficiency at low cost. In order to achieve this high accuracy however a fair amount of complexity in implementation is involved and other technologies must be used for calibration. This method by itself will not work as it requires some base location to work with.

Conclusion
Indoor location is a difficult problem to solve. Each possible approach offers both advantages and drawbacks, but does not offer a complete solution. For such a system to be successful the best solution would be a combination of the available technologies. The table below illustrates the comparison between the possible approaches in terms of accuracy, energy efficiency and setup cost.

A possible trade-off would be to combine both RFID and pedometers. An RFID tag could be placed at the entrance to the building as well as each floor to provide the pedometer with an initial location from which it can track the user. This would capitalize on the accuracy of RFID without the requirement of tags being placed throughout the building, and would provide the pedometer with an energy efficient method for finding a starting position. There are many possible combinations of these location methods which could provide a system capable of indoor location and navigation using mobile phones. The real question is which of these combinations will provide the best solution in the desired context.

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