Abstract
Due to the unavailability of global positioning system (GPS) indoors, various indoor pedestrian positioning methods have been designed to estimate the position of the user using received signal strength (RSS) measurements from radio beacons, such as wireless fidelity (WiFi) access points and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons. In indoor environments, radio-frequency (RF) signals are unpredictable and change over space and time because of multipath associated with reflection and refraction, shadow fading caused by obstacles, and interference among different devices using the same frequencies. Therefore, the outliers in the positional information obtained from the indoor positioning method based on RSS measurements occur often. For this reason, the performance of the positioning method can be degraded by the characteristics of the RF signal. To resolve this issue, a map-matching (MM) algorithm based on maximum probability (MP) estimation is applied to the indoor positioning method in this study. The MM algorithm locates the aberrant position of the user estimated by the positioning method within the limits of the adjacent pedestrian passages. Empirical experiments show that the positioning method can achieve higher positioning accuracy by leveraging the MM algorithm.