SHERPA: A Lightweight Smartphone Heterogeneity Resilient Portable Indoor Localization Framework

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Abstract
Indoor localization is an emerging application domain that promises to enhance the way we navigate in various indoor environments, as well as track equipment and people. Wireless signal-based fingerprinting is one of the leading approaches for indoor localization. Using ubiquitous Wi-Fi access points and Wi-Fi transceivers in smartphones has enabled the possibility of fingerprinting-based localization techniques that are scalable and low-cost. But the variety of Wi-Fi hardware modules and software stacks used in today's smartphones introduce errors when using Wi-Fi based fingerprinting approaches across devices, which reduces localization accuracy. We propose a framework called SHERPA that enables efficient porting of indoor localization techniques across mobile devices, to maximize accuracy. An in-depth analysis of our framework shows that it can deliver up to 8× more accurate results as compared to state-of-the-art localization techniques for a variety of environments.