Evaluating Wi-Fi indoor positioning approaches in a real world environment

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsGlobal positioning system(GPS) does not provide generally a good positioning performance in an indoor location because of many reasons (Henniges, 2012). On the other hand, other alternatives such as the WI-FI technology has become recently in a popular use to provide indoor localization. And that is due to many reasons, such as the wide spread of WI-FI infrastructure in the indoor environments and the low cost of this technology. This study attempts to evaluate different WI-FI indoor positioning approaches in a real world environment. In particular, in retail stores and shopping malls. The pros and cons of each one of these approaches are pointed out. The main purpose of this study from the company perspective is to explore the state of the art methods and the cutting edge technologies of the WI-FI IPS and to come up with an improvement of their indoor localization system. This system forms the core of the company`s retail-analytics product that uses a Wi-Fi positioning technology to provide indoor location based services for the customers and helps retailers to better understanding their businesses