Kaj Grønbæk

The past decade has witnessed substantial research on methods for indoor Wi-Fi
positioning. While much effort has gone into achieving high positioning accuracy
and easing fingerprint collection, it is our contention that the general problem
is not sufficiently well understood, thus preventing deployments and their usage
by applications to become more widespread. Based on our own and published
experiences on
indoor Wi-Fi positioning deployments, we hypothesize the following: Current indoor Wi-Fi positioning systems and their
utilization in applications are hampered by the lack of understanding of the
requirements present in the real-world deployments. In this paper, we report
findings from qualitatively studying organisational requirements for indoor
Wi-Fi positioning.
The studied cases and deployments cover both company and public-sector settings
and the deployment and evaluation of several types of indoor Wi-Fi positioning
systems over durations of up to several years. The findings suggest among others
a need for supporting all case-specific user groups, providing software platform
independence, low maintenance, allowing positioning of all user devices, regardless of
platform and form factor. Furthermore, the findings also vary significantly across
organisations, for instance in terms of need for coverage, which motivates the design of orthogonal solutions.