Access point significance measures in WLAN-based location

This paper focuses on the WLAN-based indoor location by taking into account the contribution of each hearable Access Point (AP) in the location estimation. Typically, in many indoor scenarios of interest for the future location services, such as malls, shopping centers, airports or other transit hubs, the amount of hearable APs is huge and it is important to find out whether some of these APs are redundant for the purpose of location accuracy and may be dropped. Moreover, many APs nowadays are multi-antenna APs or support multiple MAC addresses coming from exactly the same location, thus it is likely that they may bring little or no benefit if keeping all in the positioning stage. The purpose of our paper is to address various significance measures in WLAN-based location and to compare them from the point of view of the accuracy of the location solution. The access point significance is studied both at the training stage and at the estimation stage. Our models are based on real measurement data.