A multi-model particle filtering algorithm for indoor tracking of mobile terminals using RSS data

In this paper we address the problem of indoor tracking using received signal strength (RSS) as a position-dependent data measurement. This type of measurements are very appealing because they can be easily obtained with a variety of wireless technologies which are relatively inexpensive. The extraction of accurate location information from RSS in indoor scenarios is not an easy task, though. Since RSS is highly influenced by multipath propagation, it turns out very hard to adequately model the correspondence between the received power and the transmitter-to-receiver distance. The measurement models proposed in the literature are site-specific and require a great deal of information regarding the structure of the building where the tracking will be performed and therefore are not useful for a general application. For that reason we propose the use of a compound model that combines several sub-models, whose parameters are adjusted to specific and different propagation environments. This methodology, called Interacting Multiple Models (IMM), has been used in the past for modeling the motion of maneuvering targets. Here, we extend its application to handle also the uncertainty in the RSS observations and we refer to the resulting state-space model as a generalized IMM (GIMM) system. The flexibility of the GIMM approach is attained at the expense of an increase in the number of random processes that must be accurately tracked. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a Rao-Blackwellized sequential Monte Carlo tracking algorithm that exhibits good performance both with synthetic and experimental data.