Experimental study on the selection of access
point for localization in indoor environments
Martin M. Soto-Cordova †1
† Departamento de Investigación, Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades
Av. Universitaria 5175, Los Olivos, Lima, Perú
1
msoto@uch.edu.pe
2
jmanco@uch.edu.pe
Abstract—Nowadays, the popular adoption of smart phones
has enabled the development of several location-based applica-
tions such as indoor localization for shopping centers, airports,
hospitals, among others. Typically, these services are based on
Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), where the selection of
access points (APs) plays an important role for the localization
accuracy. In this paper, we evaluate different criteria of AP
selection as well as the number of required APs, the impact of
AP power transmission and the usage of different frequency
bands. The results are obtained by means of experimental
evaluations that provide more realistic comparisons. Finally,
we provide novel guidelines for the design of improved indoor
positioning systems.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the adoption of smart phones has enabled
the development of several location-based applications.
The global positioning system (GPS) is probably the
most popular technology that has changed the way
mobile users navigate outdoors. Nevertheless, this
predominant positioning system can not be utilized in indoor
environments, since the radio signals coming from satellites
are blocked by several obstacles. This has motivated the
interest for the development of new approaches based on
radio signals commonly available indoors, where Wi-Fi is
one of the most employed infrastructure-based technologies.
Typically fingerprint matching schemes have been
devised for implementing indoor-localization systems.
These scheme consists in collecting features (also known
as fingerprints) at every location to build a database, after
which the user’s location is estimated by matching online
measurements against the stored ones in the database [1]–
[5]. A typical feature is the received signal strength (RSS),
as it is often available at any mobile phone. However, the
performance of RSS-based localization schemes are also
degraded by the environmental noise, multipath fading, and
the uncertainty introduced by obstacles such as furniture,
doors and walls [4].
For that end, the position accuracy is of interest in
the design of indoor positioning system. In this regard,
the experimental evaluation of localization algorithms
is reported in some works to confirm the accuracy and
effectiveness of the approaches [6]–[9]. In [10] the authors
propose to employ different sensors to improve its accuracy,
while in [8], [11] a Kriging interpolation method is applied
to the data collected during an off-line training phase to
construct an interpolated fingerprint database that along with
and Julio C. Manco-Vásquez∗2
RSSI measurements RSSI measurements
Database
at known positions
RSSI measurements
RSSI measurements
Matching
at unknown locations
User localization
Fig. 1. Fingerprint matching scheme where RSS measurements are stored
at the database, and then compared to the online measurements to estimate
the user position.
some classifiers achieves a better performance. Moreover,
the infrastructure of indoor environments is quite complex,
and often full of APs, where not all available APs provides
useful information making it more difficult to estimate
the user’s position. In fact, some criteria for AP selection
have been suggested in [12], and some bounds have been
characterized for different deployments to provide useful
insights [13], [14]. This allows us to identify the key
features for the accuracy of user localization’s estimates
such as the number of APs, the bandwidth of the signal or
the angle of the receiver signal, among others.
In this paper, we focus on indoor localization based
on WLAN. Concretely, we address an scenario full of APs,
and present guidelines to select the most relevant APs that
provide significant gains in terms of accuracy. Moreover,
several comparisons among different criteria are examined
and evaluated taking into account their performance for
different parameters such as different AP transmission
power, different frequency bands, and the number of APs.
II. L OCALIZATION BASED ON RSS MEASUREMENTS
Fingerprint-based positioning methods comprise two
stages: first, a fingerprint database is created using mea-
surements acquired at known locations. In this stage, known
as an offline stage, RSS measurements are collected during
short periods of time and at different points within the
indoor environment. Then, during a second online stage,
a matching algorithm allows us to estimate the user po-
sition by comparing the real time measurements with those
ones stored in the database. This process is summarized
and illustrated in Fig.1. In this way, a collection of RSS
measurements is obtained at a mobile equipment after which
 1.2 m

Building A 6.3 m

Fig. 2. The buildings A and B are in front of each other.

1m
it is compared against a database of fingerprint, so that
the user position is estimated. Let us representing this
collection as a vector composed of RSS measurements 8.9 m
r(z) = {r1 (z), r2 (z), r3 (z), ..., rM (z)} at the position z =
(x, y), where rk (z) refers to the measured RSS due to the Fig. 3. The established grid for collecting the measurements at each room.
kth access point APk , and each of these measurements rk Typically a grid resolution of 1.2m x 1m is considered.
follows a shadowing model [15] given by,
d
rk = tk + 10 log10 (K) − 10γ log10 ( ) − ψdB (1) measurements at each position are quite different. In fact,
do
measurements from APs that provide similar features within
where tk denotes the transmitted power in dBm, K is a
an indoor environments should be avoided [7]. In this work,
unitless constant that depends on the antenna characteristics
we evaluate different AP selection criteria which are applied
and the average channel attenuation, γ is the path loss
to both the fingerprint database, as well as to the online data.
exponent, d and do are the distance to the target location and
The following criteria are considered:
reference distance for the antenna far-field, respectively, and
ψdB is a random variable following a Gaussian distribution, • Energy: The APs are selected in a descending order
N (0, σk2 ). according to the average energy of the measurements
rk .
The estimation of the user location is obtained by • Maximum RSS: this criterion selects APs in a descend-
measuring the similarity between the current measurement ing order according to the maximum RSS value.
and the stored one. An estimator for the position ẑ is • Entropy: APs are sorted in descending order ac-
obtained by minimizing the error E = ẑ − z for a given cording to the calculated entropy, i.e. H(rk ) =
cost function C(E), i.e. minJ (E) = min E {C(E)}. From a
P
s∈ψ P (s)log(P (s)), where ψ is the alphabet of pos-
Bayesian point of view, the optimal estimator
R is given by sible values for the random variable rk , and P (s) the
the mean of the posterior P(z/r), i.e. ẑ = zP(z/r)dz. probability mass function.
For a more practical approach, the maximum likelihood is • RSS variance: with this criterion, APs with larger
commonly employed, which is given by, variance in their corresponding RSS measurements are
"M # selected. It follows a Gram–Schmidt orthogonalization
1 X −(rk (z) − µk (z))2
P(r/z) = QM exp . and is given by,
2
k=1 (2πσk (z))
1/2 2σk2 (z) 1: procedure RSS variance (G)
k=1
(2) 2: S ← set of APs
where µk (z) refers to the received signal attenuated by 3: Vc ← constant
the free-space path loss (i.e. µk (z) = tk + 10 log10 (K) − 4: for each index in the set S do
Vr
10γ log10 ( ddo )), and σk2 (z) the variance of the received 5: Vr⊥k ← Vrk − P royVc k
signal rk (z). Nevertheless, the variance estimates requires 6: end for


collecting a large amount of data, and the uncertainty of its 7: I ← argmax
Vr⊥k
2
k
estimation is increased as few measurements are available. 8: V c ← V rk
For this reason, it is replaced by a constant. Thus, the max- 9: S ←S\k
imum likelihood reduces to the minimization of euclidean 10: if S is empty then
distance between the current measurement rk (z) and the 11: return I
stored one at the database, µk (z)1 . 12: else
13: go to 4
III. AP SELECTION CRITERIA
14: end if
Ideally, it is desirable to select APs that provide useful 15: end procedure
information for the user localization, i.e. where the collected where G = {Vr1 , Vr2 , ..., VrM }, Vrk is a vector com-
1 It is usually obtained by averaging several times the received signal posed by measurements of the kth AP which are
rk (z), so that the shadowing effect can be mitigated. collected within one room, and Vc a constant vector.
 Criteria Energy Max. RSS Entropy Variance Optimal
Mean 1.97 1.97 1.97 1.97 1.48
error
(m)
Number 6 6 6 4.5 2.94
of APs
TABLE I
T HE OBTAINED ACCURACY FOR EACH SELECTION METHOD ALONG
WITH THE REQUIRED NUMBER OF AP S
• Optimal: in this case, the APs with the best localization
results are obtained by brute force.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL EVALUATION
The experiments were conducted at the buildings of
the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where RSS
measurements were collected in geographical points that
comprise indoors places such as classrooms, corridors
hallways, etc. Particularly, for the present experimental
evaluation, the measurements were taken within two
buildings (See Fig. 2). Each of them is composed of five
floors, and 36 rooms where each of them has an AP.
The Wi-Fi network is composed of dual band APs
that transmit signals following IEEE 802.11ac and IEE
802.11gn standard. The employed equipment during our
measurement campaigns includes a USB wireless adapter
Proxim 8494 [16] and the software AirMagnet Survey
PRO [17]. With this software, the map location of user is
converted into Cartesian coordinates, while walking through
the rooms.
Fingerprint database: The measurements are collected
at each room following equidistant geographical points,
as it is shown in Fig.3. By doing this, a total of 2188
fingerprints are collected. For each geographical point, we
collect four measurements which are taken at different
times to avoid any correlation among the data. It allows us
to consider the average of the collected measurements, so
that uncertainties are reduced.
After building our database, the online measurements
are obtained by extracting them from the fingerprint
database. However, these measurements require to be
replaced at the database. One way of doing this is by
applying an interpolation method taking into account the
features of the random variable RSS. In this context, a
Kriging interpolation method [11] turns out to be suitable,
since it allows us to predict values based on the spatial
dependence where nearby points are more similar than
those that are far away.
V. P OSITIONING RESULTS
In what follows, the experimental results of the 2D
positioning are detailed and discussed. In table I, we
compare the obtained performance of each AP selection
technique, where the number of APs required is also
Criteria Energy Max. RSS Entropy Variance
Mean 2.6 2.76 2.56 2.27
error
(m)
TABLE II
T HE OBTAINED ERRORS WHEN CONSIDERING 3 AP S AND DIFFERENT
POWER TRANSMISSION AT EACH AP
Criteria Energy Max. RSS Entropy
6 APs 1.97 1.99 1.96
5 APs 1.93 2.01 1.98
4 APs 2.17 2.16 2.06
TABLE III
T HE OBTAINED RESULTS WHILE OPERATING IN THE 5 GH Z BAND OF
FREQUENCY, AND FOR DIFFERENT NUMBERS OF AP S
included. We observe that the best performance is attained
for a given number of APs, since they provide relevant
information for the user localization, whereas the rest of
APs may introduce errors. In fact, it can be observed that
AP selection methods such as the energy, the maximum
RSS, and the entropy show similar errors. Nevertheless,
the performance for the RSS variance method is achieved
with a less number of APs. This can be explained by the
fact that this strategy selects more relevant APs. In fact, we
can expect to improve the user localization by using RSS
measurements quite different at each position, which is
exploited by the RSS variance method. On the other hand,
the best results given by the optimal strategy reveals that
there is enough room to look for improvements in the AP
selection.
We also consider an scenario where different transmission
powers are often configured in a Wi-Fi network. For this
case, the addition of transmission power is emulated and
the results for the same number of APs are showed in
Table II. As we expected, the variance RSS method is able
to achieve a better performance, as it selects more relevant
APs. Finally, we address the experimental evaluation in the
band of 5 GHz. In this case, the transmission power of each
AP is different to that employed in the band of 2.4 GHz,
which does not allow us to compare both results. However,
the different performances among the exposed methods can
be observed in Table III. One common feature is the lower
performance as the number of APs is decreased. In spite
of this behavior, the variance RSS method still obtains an
error of 1.95m. with an average number of 4.94 APs. To
sum up, we believe that the user position may be better
estimated by taking into account APs providing different
RSS measurements at each position. In fact, the variance
method provides a reduced number of APs in comparison to
other strategies, since it selects APs providing distinct RSS
measurements. Moreover, this feature enables a significant
reduction of power consumption.
VI. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we have addressed the problem of select-
ing APs by means of exhaustive experimental evaluations.
Several methods have been evaluated and relevant features
have been studied for the design of novel strategies in the
AP selection. Particularly, we foresee that a strategy that
aims to identify the relevant APs by exploiting the RSS
measurements should be considered for a better design of
indoor positioning systems. In addition, these strategies are
able to obtain a suitable performance in spite of employing
fewer measurements at each position. Furthermore, the op-
timal obtained results show that there still exists irrelevant
APs that can be omitted for which further research should
be carried out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We wish to acknowledge Prof. Cesar Santivañez of the
Pontifical Catholic University of Peru for providing us the
fingerprint database to carry out this research.
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