A Review of Fingerprinting Techniques for Smart Cities

This paper introduces a review on most common fingerprinting techniques for indoor localization systems, and is aimed at the researchers who want to understand all the aspects and start working in the area of fingerprinting in smart city applications. In the paper advantages and disadvantages of each technique are discussed. Additionally, fingerprinting techniques are compared in their relationship relating cost, accuracy, distance and complexity. And, current state of art approaches for each indoor fingerprinting technique are presented.

I. Introduction

Today, our need for location information has gained more importance than ever before. The accessibility and accuracy of location data directly affects our daily life, thanks to the increasing use of smart devices, and due to the downloaded mobile applications. In the modern world we can easily navigate to almost any object and identify its location by using GPS. However, this system does not work properly under indoor conditions, due to the non-line-of-sight connections. The ability to navigate inside the buildings is as important as being able to navigate under outdoor conditions. Therefore, over the past years some alternative solutions are being developed constituting Indoor Positioning System, which is based on technologies like BLE, Wi-Fi, UWB, RFID, FM, and VLC [1]. These systems may use different existing positioning methods, such as fingerprinting, triangulation, trilateration, and proximity. Fingerprinting is one of the location estimation techniques that uses RSS (Received Signal Strength) values from various devices to create a database by storing the RSS values of a particular location. In this study, we compared different technologies proposed in the use of fingerprint methods. Accordingly, this survey will help researchers who want to start working in the area of fingerprinting in smart city applications to understand all the aspects.