Performance analysis of outdoor localization systems based on RSS fingerprinting

In the recent years the Location Based Services (LBS) are grabbing the attention of telecommunication actors since they are sources of new services and new revenues. The main challenge in the LBS domain is the localization of the mobile terminals within a certain accuracy. To this end, several radio positioning techniques have been introduced, one of which is the Location Fingerprinting. Although location fingerprinting has been investigated in some previous works, however there are only few studies that analyze its performance according to physical parameters of the underlying environment. In this paper, we present a performance analysis of the outdoor location fingerprinting systems. We propose a radio propagation model which allows us to introduce some spatial correlations for the shadowing effect and to include the temporal fluctuations of the radio signal. Based on our model, we examine the impact of different physical parameters on the system performance, and thereby we provide a framework which may be useful in the design and implementation of fingerprinting positioning systems.