Crowdsourcing Ubiquitous Indoor Localization with Non-Cooperative Wi-Fi Ranging

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sie, Emerson, Fan, Enguang, Cifuentes-Urtubey, Federico, Vasisht, Deepak
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sie, Emerson
Fan, Enguang
Cifuentes-Urtubey, Federico
Vasisht, Deepak
author_facet Sie, Emerson
Fan, Enguang
Cifuentes-Urtubey, Federico
Vasisht, Deepak
contents Indoor localization opens the path to potentially transformative applications. Although many indoor localization methods have been proposed over the years, they remain too impractical for widespread deployment in the real world. In this paper, we introduce PeepLoc, a deployable and scalable Wi-Fi-based solution for indoor localization that relies only on pre-existing devices and infrastructure. Specifically, PeepLoc works on any mobile device with an unmodified Wi-Fi transceiver and in any indoor environment with a sufficient number of Wi-Fi access points (APs) and pedestrian traffic. At the core of PeepLoc is (a) a mechanism which allows any Wi-Fi device to obtain non-cooperative time-of-flight (ToF) to any Wi-Fi AP and (b) a novel bootstrapping mechanism that relies on pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and crowdsourcing to opportunistically initialize pre-existing APs as anchor points within an environment. We implement PeepLoc using commodity hardware and evaluate it extensively across 4 campus buildings. We show PeepLoc leads to a mean and median positional error of 3.41 m and 3.06 m respectively, which is superior to existing deployed indoor localization systems and is competitive with commodity GPS in outdoor environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_18317
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Crowdsourcing Ubiquitous Indoor Localization with Non-Cooperative Wi-Fi Ranging
Sie, Emerson
Fan, Enguang
Cifuentes-Urtubey, Federico
Vasisht, Deepak
Human-Computer Interaction
Networking and Internet Architecture
Robotics
Indoor localization opens the path to potentially transformative applications. Although many indoor localization methods have been proposed over the years, they remain too impractical for widespread deployment in the real world. In this paper, we introduce PeepLoc, a deployable and scalable Wi-Fi-based solution for indoor localization that relies only on pre-existing devices and infrastructure. Specifically, PeepLoc works on any mobile device with an unmodified Wi-Fi transceiver and in any indoor environment with a sufficient number of Wi-Fi access points (APs) and pedestrian traffic. At the core of PeepLoc is (a) a mechanism which allows any Wi-Fi device to obtain non-cooperative time-of-flight (ToF) to any Wi-Fi AP and (b) a novel bootstrapping mechanism that relies on pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) and crowdsourcing to opportunistically initialize pre-existing APs as anchor points within an environment. We implement PeepLoc using commodity hardware and evaluate it extensively across 4 campus buildings. We show PeepLoc leads to a mean and median positional error of 3.41 m and 3.06 m respectively, which is superior to existing deployed indoor localization systems and is competitive with commodity GPS in outdoor environments.
title Crowdsourcing Ubiquitous Indoor Localization with Non-Cooperative Wi-Fi Ranging
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Networking and Internet Architecture
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18317