Bringing CUPID Indoor Positioning System to Practice

Souvik Sen, Dongho Kim, Stephane Laroche, Kyu-Han Kim, Jeongkeun Lee

Abstract: WiFi based indoor positioning has recently gained more attention due to the advent of the IEEE 802.11v standard, requirements by the FCC for E911 calls, and increased interest in location-based services. While there exist several indoor localization techniques, we find that these techniques tradeoff either accuracy, scalability, pervasiveness or cost -- all of which are important requirements for a truly deployable positioning solution. Wireless signal-strength based approaches suffer from location errors, whereas time-of-flight (ToF) based solutions provide good accuracy but are not scalable. Recent solutions address these issues by augmenting WiFi with either smartphone sensing or mobile crowdsourcing. However, they require tight coupling between WiFi infrastructure and a client device, or they can determine the client's location only if it is mobile. In this paper, we present CUPID2.0 which improved our previously proposed CUPID indoor positioning system to overcome these limitations. We achieve this by addressing the fundamental limitations in Time-of-Flight based localization and combining ToF with signal strength to address scalability. Experiments from $6$ cities using $40$ different mobile devices, comprising of more than $2.5$ million location fixes demonstrate feasibility. CUPID2.0 is currently under production, and we expect CUPID2.0 to ignite the wide adoption of WLAN-based positioning systems and their services.