Indoor Position Tracking Using WiFi-RTT

The most common technique today for outdoor positioning and tracking relies on GPS technology, which can be easily accessed using mapping applications on mobile devices. However, GPS does not work effectively in indoor environments due to significant attenuation of its radio signals when passing through buildings. Alternate solutions for indoor position tracking are therefore essential to support applications in various industries, such as in commercial, industrial, and retail businesses, for accurate localization and tracking of assets and people. This paper first presents a brief review of the various technologies for indoor positioning applications, and then chooses one of them, the WiFi-RTT based technique, for further development of a prototype application at a university campus. The work aims to provide an effective solution that takes advantage of the new features of the WiFi-RTT protocol to improve upon previous WiFi based position tracking solutions. For the prototype implementation, an indoor position tracking system is developed with an Android app. At the end, the paper presents evaluation results of the prototype implementation, with quantitative analysis of the accuracy from test experiments, which demonstrates its effectiveness for indoor position tracking applications.