Enhanced In-Building Fingerprint Positioning Using Femtocells Networks

Nowadays, the volume of traffic generated in indoor environments is exponentially increasing, and emerging femtocell networks are being deployed to face challenges associated to this situation. These specific in-building deployments bring the opportunity for improving the performance of indoor positioning systems which are gaining momentum. Femtocell networks can be used to support accurate and reliable location services based on the received power and fingerprint location techniques. In fingerprint positioning methods, calibration and recalibration procedures are extremely time-consuming tasks. To address this problem, a novel scenario-dependent procedure to reduce calibration points has been developed. Besides, In order to improve reliability and accuracy, several indoor propagation models have been analyzed, evaluating their suitability to reduce calibration efforts and their applicability in the recalibration procedures of recorded fingerprints. A procedure including both simulation and a measurement campaign has been developed, obtaining important improvements in accuracy, precision and reliability while reducing the efforts associated to calibration and recalibration procedures.