POSTER IPS: A Ubiquitous Indoor Positioning System

Although GPS has been considered a ubiquitous outdoor localization technology, we are still far from a similar technology for indoor environments. While a number of technologies have been proposed for indoor localization, such as WiFi and GSM-based techniques, they are isolated efforts that are way from a true ubiquitous localization system. A ubiquitous indoor positioning system is envisioned to be deployed on a large scale worldwide, with minimum overhead, to work with heterogeneous devices, and to allow users to roam seamlessly from indoor to outdoor environments. We describe an architecture for the ubiquitous indoor positioning system (IPS). We then focus on the feasibility of automating the construction of a worldwide indoor floorplan and fingerprint database which, as we believe, is one of the main challenges that limit the existence of a ubiquitous IPS system. Our proof of concept uses a crowd-sourcing approach that leverages the embedded sensors in today’s cell phones, such as accelerometers, compasses, and cameras, as a worldwide distributed floorplan generation tool. This includes constructing the floorplans and determining the areas of interest (corridors, offices, stairs, elevators, etc). The cloud computing concepts are also adopted for the processing and storage of the huge amount of data generated and requested by the system users. Our results show the ability of the system to construct an accurate floorplan and identify the area of interest with more than 90% accuracy.