A Calibration-Free Method Based on Grey Relational Analysis for Heterogeneous Smartphones in Fingerprint-Based Indoor Positioning

The fingerprint method has been widely adopted in Wi-Fi indoor positioning because of its advantage in non-line-of-sight channels between access points (APs) and mobile users. However, the received signal strength (RSS) during the fingerprint positioning process generally varies due to the dissimilar hardware configurations of heterogeneous smartphones. This difference may degrade the accuracy of fingerprint matching between fingerprint and test data. Thus, this paper puts forward a fingerprint method based on grey relational analysis (GRA) to approach the challenge of heterogeneous smartphones and to improve positioning accuracy. Initially, the grey relational coefficient (GRC) between the RSS comparability sequence of each reference point (RP) and the RSS reference sequence of the test point (TP) is calculated. Subsequently, the grey relational degree (GRD) between each RP and TP is determined on the basis of GRC, and the K most relational RPs are selected in accordance with the value of GRD. Finally, the user location is determined by weighting the K most relational RPs that correspond to the coordinates. The main advantage of this GRA method is that it does not require device calibration when handling heterogeneous smartphone problems. We further carry out extensive experiments using heterogeneous Android smartphones in an office environment to verify the positioning performance of the proposed method. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the existing ones no matter whether heterogeneous smartphones are used.