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M. Gunawan, B. Li, T. Gallagher, A. Dempster, G. Retscher:
"A New Method to Generate and Maintain a WiFi Fingerprinting Database Automatically by Using RFID";
in: "IPIN 2012", issued by: IEEE Xplore; IEEE Explore, 2012 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 2012, 1 - 6.

Location fingerprinting in WiFi positioning has been widely used in indoor environments. The key issue of the fingerprinting technology is the fingerprint database. The disadvantages of this technology are the database generation and maintenance requirements. The conventional method to create the database is that people carry out the survey manually (that is what the commercial products are doing). When the environment changes significantly (such as after a building renovation, or moving of furniture), the database has to be rebuilt. This paper proposes a new method to build and maintain the database in an efficient manner. This method only requires persons to carry a specific device which consists of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader and WiFi scanner to log the coordinates and the WiFi signal strengths. The coordinates are provided by some pre-deployed medium range (1-2 meters) RFID tags in the building with a location technique based on `cell IDī. As the persons conducting the survey are moving around the area of interest for purposes other than the fingerprint survey (such as a security guard who regularly patrols the whole building anyway), so the fingerprint database can be generated "automatically". Also, the database can be refined as the data are being accumulated. When the environment changes, it can be detected by the self-refining database. A preliminary test was carried out for the proposed method. The results show that it works well.

WiFi, Fingerprinting Database, RFID