Improving Wi-Fi Indoor Positioning via AP Sets Similarity and Semi-Supervised Affinity Propagation Clustering

Indoor localization techniques using Wi-Fi fingerprints have become prevalent in recent years because of their cost-effectiveness and high accuracy. The most common algorithm adopted for Wi-Fi fingerprinting is weighted K -nearest neighbors (WKNN), which calculates K -nearest neighboring points to a mobile user. However, existing WKNN cannot effectively address the problems that there is a difference in observed AP sets during offline and online stages and also not all the K neighbors are physically close to the user. In this paper, similarity coefficient is used to measure the similarity of AP sets, which is then combined with radio signal strength values to calculate the fingerprint distance. In addition, isolated points are identified and removed before clustering based on semi-supervised affinity propagation. Real-world experiments are conducted on a university campus and results show the proposed approach does outperform existing approaches.