Data Fusion Methods for Indoor Positioning Systems Based on Channel State Information Fingerprinting

Indoor signals are susceptible to NLOS propagation effects, multipath effects, and a dynamic environment, posing more challenges than outdoor signals despite decades of advancements in location services. In modern Wi-Fi networks that support both MIMO and OFDM techniques, Channel State Information (CSI) is now used as an enhanced wireless channel metric replacing the Wi-Fi received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting method. The indoor multipath effects, however, make it less robust and stable. This study proposes a positive knowledge transfer-based heterogeneous data fusion method for representing the different scenarios of temporal variations in CSI-based fingerprint measurements generated in a complex indoor environment targeting indoor parking lots, while reducing the training calibration overhead. Extensive experiments were performed with real-world scenarios of the indoor parking phenomenon. Results revealed that the proposed algorithm proved to be an efficient algorithm with consistent positioning accuracy across all potential variations. In addition to improving indoor parking location accuracy, the proposed algorithm provides computationally robust and efficient location estimates in dynamic environments. A Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) analysis was also used to estimate the lower bound of the parking lot location error variance under various temporal variation scenarios. Based on analytical derivations, we prove that the lower bound of the variance of the location estimator depends on the (i) angle of the base stations, (ii) number of base stations, (iii) distance between the target and the base station, [Formula: see text] (iv) correlation of the measurements, [Formula: see text] and (v) signal propagation parameters [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text].