Construction of Time-Stamped Mobility Map for Path Tracking via Smith-Waterman Measurement Matching

Path tracking in wireless and mobile environments is a fundamental technology for ubiquitous location-based services (LBSs). In particular, it is very challenging to develop highly accurate and cost-efficient tracking systems applied to the anonymous areas where the floor plans are not available for security and privacy reasons. This paper proposes a novel path tracking approach for large Wi-Fi areas based on the time-stamped unlabeled mobility map which is constructed from Smith-Waterman received signal strength (RSS) measurement matching. Instead of conventional location fingerprinting, we construct mobility map with the technique of dimension reduction from the raw measurement space into a low-dimensional embedded manifold. The feasibility of our proposed approach is verified by the real-world experiments in the HKUST campus Wi-Fi networks, sMobileNet. The experimental results prove that our approach is adaptive and capable of achieving an adequate precision level in path tracking.