DHCLoc: A Device-Heterogeneity-Tolerant and Channel-Adaptive Passive WiFi Localization Method Based on DNN

Passive WiFi localization refers to determining the location of WiFi-enabled mobile devices by deploying dedicated WiFi access points to sniff WiFi packets transmitted by these mobile devices and measure the corresponding received signal strengths (RSSs) for the use in localization. However, most existing studies fail to consider the effect of multiple channels where WiFi packets are transmitted and sniffed. The problem is further exacerbated by device heterogeneity occurring across various mobile devices. In this article, we present a unified deep neural network (DNN)-based solution, termed DHCLoc, to address these two challenges. To be specific, a Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB)-based analysis reveals that utilizing multichannel information will benefit localization, motivating us to include channel information into DHCLoc. Moreover, a novel maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)-based localization framework is introduced by incorporating a new variable to characterize the RSS measurement offsets caused by device heterogeneity, inspiring us to apply adversarial training to adopt such offsets against device heterogeneity. Extensive experiments using two real-world data sets are conducted, and show that, in comparison with several existing methods, DHCLoc can improve the localization accuracy by at least 25.2% and 25.8%, respectively.