Fingerprinting techniques, which are a common method for indoor localization, have been recently applied with success into outdoor settings. Particularly, the communication signals of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Sigfox, have been used for localization. In this rather recent field of study, not many publicly available datasets, which would facilitate the consistent comparison of different positioning systems, exist so far. In the current study, a published dataset of RSSI measurements on a Sigfox network deployed in Antwerp, Belgium is used to analyse the appropriate selection of preprocessing steps and to tune the hyperparameters of a kNN fingerprinting method. Initially, the tuning of hyperparameter k for a variety of distance metrics, and the selection of efficient data transformation schemes, proposed by relevant works, is presented. In addition, accuracy improvements are achieved in this study, by a detailed examination of the appropriate adjustment of the parameters of the data transformation schemes tested, and of the handling of out of range values. With the appropriate tuning of these factors, the achieved mean localization error was 298 meters, and the median error was 109 meters. To facilitate the reproducibility of tests and comparability of results, the code and train validation test split used in this study are available.
The proliferation of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN), such as Sigfox and LoRaWAN, has brought a new domain of application of the fingerprinting methods. A recent study @cite_10 has experimentally verified the intuitive assumption that fingerprinting methods outperform, in terms of accuracy, proximity or ranging positioning methods, in a Sigfox setting.
@cite_10
2791401550 2968588162 2901188462 2902629385
Because of the increasing relevance of the Internet of Things and location-based services, researchers are evaluating wireless positioning techniques, such as fingerprinting, on Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) communication. In order to evaluate fingerprinting in large outdoor environments, extensive, time-consuming measurement campaigns need to be conducted to create useful datasets. This paper presents three LPWAN datasets which are collected in large-scale urban and rural areas. The goal is to provide the research community with a tool to evaluate fingerprinting algorithms in large outdoor environments. During a period of three months, numerous mobile devices periodically obtained location data via a GPS receiver which was transmitted via a Sigfox or LoRaWAN message. Together with network information, this location data is stored in the appropriate LPWAN dataset. The first results of our basic fingerprinting implementation, which is also clarified in this paper, indicate a mean location estimation error of 214.58 m for the rural Sigfox dataset, 688.97 m for the urban Sigfox dataset and 398.40 m for the urban LoRaWAN dataset. In the future, we will enlarge our current datasets and use them to evaluate and optimize our fingerprinting methods. Also, we intend to collect additional datasets for Sigfox, LoRaWAN and NB-IoT. Fingerprinting techniques, which are a common method for indoor localization, have been recently applied with success into outdoor settings. Particularly, the communication signals of Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Sigfox, have been used for localization. In this rather recent field of study, not many publicly available datasets, which would facilitate the consistent comparison of different positioning systems, exist so far. In the current study, a published dataset of RSSI measurements on a Sigfox network deployed in Antwerp, Belgium is used to analyse the appropriate selection of preprocessing steps and to tune the hyperparameters of a kNN fingerprinting method. Initially, the tuning of hyperparameter k for a variety of distance metrics, and the selection of efficient data transformation schemes, proposed by relevant works, is presented. In addition, accuracy improvements are achieved in this study, by a detailed examination of the appropriate adjustment of the parameters of the data transformation schemes tested, and of the handling of out of range values. With the appropriate tuning of these factors, the achieved mean localization error was 298 meters, and the median error was 109 meters. To facilitate the reproducibility of tests and comparability of results, the code and train validation test split used in this study are available. The Internet of Things (IoT) has caused the modern society to connect everything in our environment to a network. In a myriad of IoT applications, smart devices need to be located. This can easily be done by satellite based receivers. However, there are more energy-efficient localization technologies, especially in Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN). In this research, we discuss the accuracy of an outdoor fingerprinting technique using a large outdoor Sigfox dataset which is openly available. A kNN (k Nearest Neighbors) algorithm is applied to our fingerprinting database. 31 different distance functions and four RSS data representations are evaluated. Our analysis shows that a Sigfox transmitter can be located with a mean estimation error of 340 meters. Location-based services play an important role in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, a trade-off has to be made between the location estimation error and the battery lifetime of an IoT device. As IoT devices communicate over Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN), signal strength localization methods can use the existing communication link to estimate their location. In this paper, we present a comparison of three proximity methods, one fingerprinting method and three ranging methods using Sigfox communication messages. To evaluate these methods, we use a ground truth Sigfox dataset which we collected in a large urban environment, as well as new evaluation data that was collected in the same urban area. With a mean estimation error of 586 m, our fingerprinting method achieves the best result compared to other signal strength localization methods.