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We study the problem of indoor localization using commodity WiFi channel state information (CSI) measurements. The accuracy of methods developed to address this problem is limited by the overall bandwidth used by the WiFi device as well as various types of signal distortions imposed by the underlying hardware. In this paper, we propose a localization method that performs channel impulse response (CIR) estimation by splicing measured CSI over multiple WiFi bands. In order to overcome hardware-induced phase distortions, we propose a phase retrieval (PR) scheme that only uses CSI magnitude values to estimate the CIR. To achieve high localization accuracy, the PR scheme involves a sparse recovery step, which exploits the fact that the CIR is sparse over the delay domain, due to the small number of contributing signal paths in an indoor environment. Simulation results indicate that our approach outperforms the state of the art by an order of magnitude (cm-level localization accuracy) for more than 90% of the trials and for various SNR regimes.
Using commodity WiFi data for applications such as indoor localization, object identification and tracking and channel sounding has recently gained considerable attention. We study the problem of channel impulse response (CIR) estimation from commodity WiFi channel state information (CSI). The accuracy of a CIR estimation method in this setup is limited by both the available channel bandwidth as well as various CSI distortions induced by the underlying hardware. We propose a multi-band splicing method that increases channel bandwidth by combining CSI data across multiple frequency bands. In order to compensate for the CSI distortions, we develop a per-band processing algorithm that is able to estimate the distortion parameters and remove them to yield the clean CSI. This algorithm incorporates the atomic norm denoising sparse recovery method to exploit channel sparsity. Splicing clean CSI over M frequency bands, we use orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) as an estimation method to recover the sparse CIR with high (M-fold) resolution. Unlike previous works in the literature, our method does not appeal to any limiting assumption on the CIR (other than the widely accepted sparsity assumption) or any ad hoc processing for distortion removal. We show, empirically, that the proposed method outperforms the state of the art in terms of localization accuracy.
Widespread adoption of indoor positioning systems based on WiFi fingerprinting is at present hindered by the large efforts required for measurements collection during the offline phase. Two approaches were recently proposed to address such issue: crowdsourcing and RSS radiomap prediction, based on either interpolation or propagation channel model fitting from a small set of measurements. RSS prediction promises better positioning accuracy when compared to crowdsourcing, but no systematic analysis of the impact of system parameters on positioning accuracy is available. This paper fills this gap by introducing ViFi, an indoor positioning system that relies on RSS prediction based on Multi-Wall Multi-Floor (MWMF) propagation model to generate a discrete RSS radiomap (virtual fingerprints). Extensive experimental results, obtained in multiple independent testbeds, show that ViFi outperforms virtual fingerprinting systems adopting simpler propagation models in terms of accuracy, and allows a sevenfold reduction in the number of measurements to be collected, while achieving the same accuracy of a traditional fingerprinting system deployed in the same environment. Finally, a set of guidelines for the implementation of ViFi in a generic environment, that saves the effort of collecting additional measurements for system testing and fine tuning, is proposed.
In this paper, we propose an indoor localization system employing ordered sequence of access points (APs) based on received signal strength (RSS). Unlike existing indoor localization systems, our approach does not require any time-consuming and laborious site survey phase to characterize the radio signals in the environment. To be precise, we construct the fingerprint map by cutting the layouts of the interested area into regions with only the knowledge of positions of APs. This can be done offline within a second and has a potential for practical use. The localization is then achieved by matching the ordered AP-sequence to the ones in the fingerprint map. Different from traditional fingerprinting that employing all APs information, we use only selected APs to perform localization, due to the fact that, without site survey, the possibility in obtaining the correct AP sequence is lower if it involves more APs. Experimental results show that, the proposed system achieves localization accuracy < 5m with an accumulative density function (CDF) of 50% to 60% depending on the density of APs. Furthermore, we observe that, using all APs for localization might not achieve the best localization accuracy, e.g. in our case, 4 APs out of total 7 APs achieves the best performance. In practice, the number of APs used to perform localization should be a design parameter based on the placement of APs.
Phase retrieval (PR) is an important component in modern computational imaging systems. Many algorithms have been developed over the past half century. Recent advances in deep learning have opened up a new possibility for robust and fast PR. An emerging technique, called deep unfolding, provides a systematic connection between conventional model-based iterative algorithms and modern data-based deep learning. Unfolded algorithms, powered by data learning, have shown remarkable performance and convergence speed improvement over the original algorithms. Despite their potential, most existing unfolded algorithms are strictly confined to a fixed number of iterations when employing layer-dependent parameters. In this study, we develop a novel framework for deep unfolding to overcome the existing limitations. Even if our framework can be widely applied to general inverse problems, we take PR as an example in the paper. Our development is based on an unfolded generalized expectation consistent signal recovery (GEC-SR) algorithm, wherein damping factors are left for data-driven learning. In particular, we introduce a hypernetwork to generate the damping factors for GEC-SR. Instead of directly learning a set of optimal damping factors, the hypernetwork learns how to generate the optimal damping factors according to the clinical settings, thus ensuring its adaptivity to different scenarios. To make the hypernetwork work adapt to varying layer numbers, we use a recurrent architecture to develop a dynamic hypernetwork, which generates a damping factor that can vary online across layers. We also exploit a self-attention mechanism to enhance the robustness of the hypernetwork. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing ones in convergence speed and accuracy, and still works well under very harsh settings, that many classical PR algorithms unstable or even fail.
We introduce WiCluster, a new machine learning (ML) approach for passive indoor positioning using radio frequency (RF) channel state information (CSI). WiCluster can predict both a zone-level position and a precise 2D or 3D position, without using any precise position labels during training. Prior CSI-based indoor positioning work has relied on non-parametric approaches using digital signal-processing (DSP) and, more recently, parametric approaches (e.g., fully supervised ML methods). However these do not handle the complexity of real-world environments well and do not meet requirements for large-scale commercial deployments: the accuracy of DSP-based method deteriorates significantly in non-line-of-sight conditions, while supervised ML methods need large amounts of hard-to-acquire centimeter accuracy position labels. In contrast, WiCluster is both precise and requires weaker label-information that can be easily collected. Our first contribution is a novel dimensionality reduction method for charting. It combines a triplet-loss with a multi-scale clustering-loss to map the high-dimensional CSI representation to a 2D/3D latent space. Our second contribution is two weakly supervised losses that map this latent space into a Cartesian map, resulting in meter-accuracy position results. These losses only require simple to acquire priors: a sketch of the floorplan, approximate location of access-point locations and a few CSI packets that are labeled with the corresponding zone in the floorplan. Thirdly, we report results and a robustness study for 2D positioning in a single-floor office building and 3D positioning in a two-floor home to show the robustness of our method.