How much can we trust RSSI for the IoT indoor location-based services?

Abstract

One of the key challenges in the ever-changing ubiquitous computing environment of Internet of Things is accurate determination of each of its’ elements location. Indoor localization for smartphones has been in line with this research initiatives in the last decade, along with the inherited background from wireless sensor networks perspective. Therefore, most of the algorithms from the literature are based on distance measurements obtained from radio signal strength ranging technique and evaluated mostly through simulations. In this paper, we experimentally evaluated a well-known technique for localization based on multidimensional scaling, using different models of smartphones. Additionally, we analyzed the behavior of the signal strength measured by the smartphones under different field condition. From our results, we concluded that radio signal strength indicator should be combined with more accurate ranging techniques into hybrid solutions to be used for indoor localization of smartphones.