IEEE 802.11 WLAN Based Real Time Indoor Positioning: Literature Survey and Experimental Investigations

Abstract

Indoor positioning has emerged as a hot topic that gained gradual interest from both academia and industry. Accurate estimation is necessitated in a variety of location-based services such as healthcare, repository tracking, and security. Additional equipment for location sensing could be used for accurate estimation, but they are not widely used in general because those alternatives will cause specialization in brands and will be costly. Among all suggestions in literature including hardware and intense sophisticated computations, a versatile and low-cost location determination technology, which uses existing WLAN infrastructure of indoor environments, has been developed without incurring extra charge; this method is rising as a way of positioning. WLAN is capable to be used within an indoor positioning system soon in real environments. It is a good alternative in terms of accuracy, precision and cost, compared to similar systems. Especially with the common usage of smartphones and tablet PCs, it became the most easy-to-use method, too. In this paper, we present a brief survey on such systems, methodologies, techniques and discuss advantages and disadvantages of each of these. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V.