RSS Certainty: An Efficient Solution for RSS Variation due to Device Heterogeneity in WLAN Fingerprinting-based Indoor Positioning System

Fingerprinting method has been adopted widely for WLAN-based indoor positioning because of its effectiveness and the low-cost infrastructure of WLAN. However, the WLAN fingerprinting, based on the received signal strength (RSS), accuracy will be declined due to mobile devices heterogeneity since each device reads RSS differently even at the same location and the same time. This paper presents RSS Certainty (RSC) as an efficient solution for received signal strength variation because of device heterogeneity. The efficiency of RSC has been proved theoretically and experimentally it increases the positioning accuracy by more than 10%. RSC-based positioning performance evaluated against the most recent literatures which were proposed to handle the effect of the device heterogeneity such as Weight-RSS (wRSS); Signal Strength Difference (SSD) and Hyperbolic Location Fingerprinting (HLF), and the results show that RSC-based positioning has the best accuracy.