Figure 1: Radio Fingerprinting based methods for Location
Estimation.
respective signal strengths from nearby Base Sta-
tions/Access Points are collected. During the online
stage, a location positioning technique uses the cur-
rently observed signal strengths and previously col-
lected information to figure out an estimated location.
The main challenge to the techniques based on loca-
tion fingerprinting is that the received signal strength
could be affected by diffraction, reflection, and scat-
tering in the propagation indoor environments(Bahl
and Padmanabhan, 2000; Bahl et al., 2000; Battiti
et al., 2002).
Radio Finger Printing techniques, which are also
known as location fingerprinting, can be categorized
into three broad categories: deterministic techniques,
probabilistic techniques, and machine learning based
techniques as shown in Figure 1. Deterministic tech-
niques, represent the signal strength of an access point
at a location by a scalar value, for example, the mean
value, and use non-probabilistic approaches to esti-
mate the user location. For example, in the Radar
(Bahl et al., 2000) system the authors use nearest
neighborhood techniques to infer the user location.
The accuracy of RADAR is about three meters with
fifty percent probability. K. Pehlavan et al. also used
kNN (k-nearest neighbour) technique and achieved
2.8 meter distance error (Pahlavan et al., 2002). On
the other hand, probabilistic techniques, store infor-
mation about the signal strength distributions from the
access points in the radio map and use probabilistic
techniques to estimate the user location. For example,
the Horus (Youssef and Agrawala, 2004; Youssef and
Agrawala, 2008) system from the Universityof Mary-
land uses the stored radio map to find the location
that has the maximum probability given the received
signal strength vector. Probabilistic approaches like
Bayesian networks based solutions achieve better per-
formance but they are computationally exhaustive and
difficult to scale.
In a heterogeneous environment, e.g. inside a
building or in a variegated urban geometry, the re-
ceived signal strength is a very complex function of
the distance, the geometry, and the materials. The
complexity of the inverse problem (to derive the po-
sition from the signals) and the lack of complete in-
formation, motivate to consider flexible models based
on machine learning approaches (i.e. artificial neural
networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy systems) (Ahmad
et al., 2008; Battiti et al., 2002; Chen, 2005; Ding
et al., 2008; Gupta et al., 2009; Yang et al., 2010;
Youssef and Agrawala, 2008). Battiti et al. (Battiti
et al., 2002) have employed neural networks for this
problem. Battiti et al. used feed forward back prop-
agation network that takes RSS of 3 Wireless Access
Points (AP) to cover 624 square meter area, and re-
ported median estimation distance error of 1.75 me-
ter. This model assumes that the signals of all the ac-
cess points are available at every location all the time.
Practically, this approach has limited applicability be-
cause in real life scenario some AP may not be visi-
ble (not in range) at all the locations for all the time
(Ahmad et al., 2008). The benefit of machine learn-
ing based methods are that they do not need ad-hoc
infrastructure in addition to the wireless LAN, while
the flexible modeling and learning capabilities of ma-
chine learning approaches achieve lower errors in de-
termining the position, and are scalable to incremen-
tal improvements. A user needs only a map of the
working space and some identified locations to train a
system.
3 SSLLE: SEMI-SUPERVISED
LOCALLY LINEAR
EMBEDDING
The RSS dataset collected for location estimation has
high dimensionality and contains several features but
it may be described as a function of only a few under-
lying parameters. Therefore for computing efficiency,
dimensional reduction technique is used to find out
the low dimensional manifold that is embedded in
a high dimensional space. We use Locally Linear
Embedding (LLE) (Roweis and Saul, 2000; Saul and
Roweis, 2003) algorithm which computes low dimen-
sional embedding of high dimensional data so that
neighborhoodinformation is preserved. LLE does not
estimate the pair-wise distances between widely sepa-
rated data points. Unlike Principle Component Anal-
ysis (PCA), Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS), LLE
recovers nonlinear structure from locally linear fits.
LLE attempts to discover nonlinear structure in high
dimensional data by exploiting the local symmetries
of linear reconstructions. Notably, LLE maps its in-
puts into a single global coordinate system of lower
dimensionality, and its optimizations, though capable
of generating highly nonlinear embeddings, do not in-
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