pre-processing of fingerprints to improve the positioning accuracy of 802.11-based positioning systems
Since the first days of location-based services, the reliable estimation of a user's position has been seen as one of the key prerequisites for their success. While satellite-based systems can deliver suitable results when the user is outdoors, another solution is needed in case that he is located inside a building. Here, the position estimation with the help of 802.11 and fingerprinting algorithms promises to fill the gap. One major drawback though is the high initial effort that is needed to deploy such a fingerprinting-based 802.11 positioning system. Therefore, in this paper, novel algorithms that pre-process the data collected for the fingerprints are presented. By this pre-processing step, the amount of data that needs to be collected and therefore also the amount of time that needs to be spent collecting the data can be reduced by about 80\%. Additionally, despite the reduced amount of data, the positioning accuracy cannot only be retained but even slightly improved by about 15\% depending on the system's setup.
fingerprinting positioning systems location-based services context-aware applications ieee 802.11