The Airplace Indoor Positioning Platform for Android Smartphones

In this demonstration paper, we present an indoor positioning system developed for Android smartphones, coined Airplace. To infer the unknown user location we rely on ubiquitous WLANs and exploit Received Signal Strength (RSS) values from neighboring Access Points (AP) that are constantly monitored by the mobile devices under normal operation. Our system follows a mobile-based network-assisted architecture to eliminate the communication overhead and respect user privacy. In a typical scenario, when a user walks inside a building a smartphone client conducts a single communication with our Distribution Server to receive the RSS radiomap and is then able to position itself independently using the observed RSS values. Moreover, we have implemented an Android application to facilitate the collection of RSS values by users that may contribute their data to our system for constructing and updating the radiomap through crowdsourcing1. We will demonstrate the real-time positioning capabilities of the system during the conference by allowing attendees to carry an Android tablet in order to view their position on a floorplan map, while walking around inside the demo area (interactive scenario). Moreover, we will illustrate how to evaluate the performance of different positioning algorithms using profiled data in a trace-driven scenario. Our objective is to highlight the effectiveness and applicability of our system and at the same time the participants will be able to appreciate the potential of indoor location-oriented services and applications.