Delta Wi-Fi Positioning System

Abstract

Many solutions exist for positioning users inside buildings, where access to satellites is limited. Conventional building materials, such as concrete and steel greatly reduce reception of satellites, creating the requirement for other methods of positioning. The objective of this paper is to analyse the available solutions for indoor positioning, choose a suitable solution and implement an interactive application with a Graphical User Interface for use in the Delta building. The finished application is to provide a visual overview of a user’s location on a floor map of the Delta building, approximate position of the user expressed in pixels and an accuracy metric of the calculated prediction. While similar solutions have already been researched for use in the Delta building, no previous papers used weighted mean and trilateration methods as the positioning algorithm choice and none created an interactive map-based GUI as the application, with coordinates for the predicted user’s position. As a result of this thesis, a multi-platform application was successfully developed in Python for use in the Delta building. Using detailed floor maps and a list of routers located throughout the Delta building, the user’s location can be predicted with adequate accuracy using weighted mean and trilateration algorithms. Further, the finished application contains additional functionality and an interactive tool to add new routers to the database. Despite the adequate accuracy of the final application, more advanced implementations of the positioning methods should be considered to further increase the accuracy. Further, additional ways to fine-tune variables used in the application should be discovered. Finally, despite the multi-platform support, not all platforms and adapters give optimal results due to variability in used hardware components and built-in software limitations.