A new approach to design a WLAN-based positioning system

In recent years, as the deployment of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) in dense-urban areas is growing rapidly, it can be a perfect supplement for providing location information of users in indoor environments where other positioning techniques such as GPS, are not much effective. However, most systems only focus on the network deployment for positioning but overlook that the original purpose of these WLAN infrastructures is providing the required connectivity. Furthermore, there is a lack of good analytical models that can be used as a framework for designing and deploying the positioning systems. In this paper, we propose an effective approach where WLAN planning and positioning error reduction are modeled as an optimization problem and tackled together during the WLAN planning process. A Mono-objective algorithm and a multi-objective algorithm both based on Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) are implemented respectively and the simulations demonstrate that these two algorithms are highly efficient for designing the indoor positioning system.