Use of fingerprinting in WiFi-based outdoor positioning

Abstract

Though GPS is the most popular positioning system at presents it does not perform well in indoor environments and urban canyons or metropolitan city areas. Wi-Fi has been accepted as one of the good candidates for indoor positioning, its performance in outdoor environment is also of interest as a Wi-Fi based positioning system can overcome the shortcomings of GPS. An experiment has been carried out in the Sydney CBD area, where Wi-Fi access points (AP) are densely deployed. It is a cost effective system as the signal strength of the existing APs are used. Fingerprinting technique is utilized to determine the user’s position, 173 reference points were selected to create the fingerprint database and 26 test points were used to analyse the accuracy of positioning.