CSI-based sliding window fingerprinting method tailored for a signal blocking environment in VLP systems.

In visible light indoor positioning systems, the localization performance of the received signal strength (RSS)-based fingerprinting algorithm would drop dramatically due to the occlusion of the line-of-sight (LOS) signal caused by randomly moving people or objects. A sliding window fingerprinting (SWF) algorithm based on channel state information (CSI) is put forward to enhance the accuracy and robustness of indoor positioning in this work. The core idea behind SWF is to combine CSI with sliding matching. The sliding window is used to match the received CSI and the fingerprints in the database twice to obtain the optimal matching value and reduce the interference caused by the lack of the LOS signal. On this premise, in order to reflect the different contributions of various paths in CSI to the calculation of match values, a weighted sliding window fingerprinting (W-SWF) is also proposed for the purpose of further improving the accuracy of fingerprint matching. A 4 m × 4 m × 3 m indoor multipath scene with four LEDs is established to evaluate the positioning performance. The simulation results reveal that the mean errors of the proposed method are 0.20 cm and 1.43 cm respectively when the LOS signal of 1 or 2 LEDs is blocked. Compared with the traditional RSS algorithm, the weighted k-nearest neighbor (WKNN) algorithm, and the adaptive residual weighted k-nearest neighbor (ARWKNN) algorithm, the SWF algorithm achieves over 90% improvement in terms of mean error and root mean square error (RMSE).