WinIPS: WiFi-based non-intrusive IPS for online radio map construction

Existing WiFi fingerprinting-based Indoor Positioning System (IPS) suffers from two major bottlenecks. One is that the offline site survey process is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. The other is that the offline calibrated received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint database is vulnerable to environmental dynamics. To address these issues comprehensively, in this paper, we propose WinIPS, a WiFi-based non-intrusive IPS that enables automatic online radio map construction and adaptation for calibration-free indoor localization. WinIPS is able to capture data packets transmitted in the existing WiFi traffic and extract the RSS values and MAC addresses of both access points (AP) and mobile devices (MD) in a non-intrusive manner. By leveraging APs as online reference points for radio map construction, we can completely remove the needs of laborious offline site survey process. The constructed radio map is more robust to environmental dynamics since it is updated automatically in real-time. Extensive experimental results verify the superiority of WinIPS in terms of RSS estimation accuracy and localization accuracy, and these merits make it more suitable for practical large-scale implementation.