A new approach for Wi-Fi based customer tracking and positioning in a long narrow indoor space

Wi-Fi based positioning technology has been recognized as an effective technology for tracking people or mobile objects in an indoor environment. One such application is tracking and positioning customers in large shopping malls. This research is part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project aiming at developing an effective customer tracking approach to acquire customer shopping behavior. A critical task for this project is tracking customers in a long narrow space such as a long corridor in large shopping malls. Generally, the geographical distribution of Wi-Fi access points (APs) in long corridors is poor as the APs are mounted along a straight line, hence it is challenging to use these APs to track the customers walking through the corridor. To address this problem, a new approach for the so-called same-line-dual-connection (SLDC) scenario was developed in this research. It was based on analysis of many long corridors in large shopping malls and focused on developing a relatively simple way to determine a customer's location with an acceptable positioning accuracy, mainly for the common case in a long corridor where only two AP connections (or called "dual-connection") are available and the two APs and the customer all three are located (or almost located) in the same line. . The distances for position determination are calculated from the received signal strength (RSS) observables using a path loss model and a differential correction method was used to eliminate the errors in the distances. In addition, a back tracing method was also employed to use historical data to determine the current geometrical location of the customer. The preliminary result of our simulation test showed that this approach was promising and effective, and a 1.6 m positioning accuracy was achieved. Furthermore, both advantages and disadvantages of this approach were discussed