Bayesian Indoor Positioning

Systems

Presented by: Eiman Elnahrawy

Joint work with: David Madigan, Richard P. Martin, Wen-Hua

Ju, P. Krishnan, A.S. Krishnakumar

Rutgers University and Avaya Labs

Infocom 2005
 Wireless Explosion
Technology trends creating cheap wireless communication in
every computing device

Device radios offer “indoors” localization opportunity in 2,3D

New capability compared to traditional communication networks

Can we localize every device having radio using only this

available infrastructure??

3 technology communities:
WLAN (802.11x)

Sensor networks (zigbee)

Cell carriers(3G)
 Radio-based Localization
Signal decays linearly with log
distance in laboratory setting
Sj = b0j + b1j log Dj
Dj = sqrt((x-xj)2 + (y-yj)2)
[-80,-67,-50]
Use triangulation to compute
(x,y) » Problem solved (x?,y?)

Not in real life!!

noise, multi-path, reflections,
systematic errors, etc.
Fingerprint or RSS
Supervised Learning-based Systems

Training

Offline phase [-80,-67,-50]

Collect “labeled” training
(x?,y?)
data [(x,y), S1,S2,S3,..]

Online phase
Match “unlabeled” RSS
[(?,?), S1,S2,S3,..] to existing Fingerprint or RSS
“labeled” training fingerprints
 Previous Work
People have tried almost all existing supervised learning
approaches
Well known Radar (NN)
Probabilistic, e.g., Bayes a posteriori likelihood
Support Vector Machines
Multi-layer Perceptrons
…
[Bahl00, Battiti02, Roos02,Youssef03, Krishnan04,…]

All have a major drawback

Labeled training fingerprints “profiling”
Labor intensive (286 in 32 hrs!!)
May need to be repeated over the time
 Contribution
Why don’t we try Bayesian Graphical Models (BGM)?
any performance gains?
Performance-wise: comparable
Minimum labeled fingerprints
Adaptive
Simultaneously locate a set of objects

In fact it can be a zero-profiling approach

No more “labeled” training data needed
Unlabeled data can be obtained using existing data traffic
 Loocle TM

General purpose localization analogous to

general purpose communication!

Can we make finding objects in the physical

space as easy as Google ?
Can this dream come true?
We believe we are so close

Only existing infrastructure

Localize with only the radios on existing devices
Additional resources as performance enhancements

Ad-hoc
No more labeled data (our contribution)
 Outline
Motivations and Goals

Experimental setup

Bayesian background

Models of increasing complexities [labeled-unlabeled]

Comparison to previous work

Conclusion and Future Work

 Experimental Setup
3 Office buildings
BR, CA Up, CA Down

802.11b radio

Different sessions, days

All give similar performance

Focus on BR (no particular

reason)

BR: 5 access points, 225 ft x 175 ft, 254 measurements

Bayesian Graphical Models
Encode dependencies/conditional independence
between variables

Vertices = random variables X Y

Edges = relationships

D
Example [(X,Y), S], AP at (xb, yb)
Log-based signal strength propagation
S = b0 + b1 log D S
D= sqrt((X-xb)2 + (Y-yb)2)
 Model 1 (Simple): labeled data
Position Variables Xi Yi

Distances D1 D2 D3 D4 D5

Observed Signal Strengths S1 S2 S3 S4 S5

Base Station Parameters

“Unknowns" b01 b11 b02 b12 b03 b13 b04 b14 b05 b15

Xi ~ uniform(0, Length) Yi ~ uniform(0, Width)

Si ~ N(b0i+b1ilog(Di),δi), i=1,2,3,4,5
b0i ~ N(0,1000), i=1,2,3,4,5 b1i ~ N(0,1000), i=1,2,3,4,5
 Input
Labeled: training
[(x1,y1),(-40,-55,-90,..)]
[(x2,y2),(-60,-56,-80,..)]
[(x3,y3),(-80,-70,-30,..)]
[(x4,y4),(-64,-33,-70,..)]
Output
Probability distributions
for all the unknown
variables
Propagation constants
b0i, b1i for each Base Station

Unlabeled: mobile object(s)

[(?,?),(-45,-65,-40,..)]
(x,y) for each (?,?)
[(?,?),(-35,-45,-78,..)]
[(?,?),(-75,-55,-65,..)]
Great! but now how do we find
the location of the mobile?

Closed form solution doesn’t usually exist

» simulation/analytic approx

We used MCMC simulation (Markov Chain

Monte Carlo) to generate predictive samples from
the joint distribution for every unknown (x,y)
location
Example Output
 Some Results.. Comparable

Max

75th
Med
25th

Min

M1 is better
 Model 2 (Hierarchical): labeled
data
Allowing any values for b’s too unconstrained!
Xi Yi
Assume all base-stations parameters
normally distributed around a hidden
variable with a mean and variance
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
Xi ~ uniform(0,Length)
Yi ~ uniform(0,Width)
Si ~ N(b0i+b1ilog(Di), δi) S1 S2 S3 S4 S5
b0i ~ N(b0, δb0)
b1i ~ N(b1, δb1)
b0 ~ N(0,1000) b01 b11 b02 b12 b03 b13 b04 b14 b05 b15
b1 ~ N(0,1000)
δ0 ~ Gamma(0.001,0.001)
δ1 ~ Gamma(0.001,0.001) b
i=1,2,3,4,5
Motivation borrowing strength might provide some predictive benefits
 More Results..
Leave-one-out error (feet)
Average Error (feet)
35 40

Labeled M1
30

Labeled Hier M2
SmoothNN
25
20
10 15

0 50 100 150 200 250

Size of labeled data

M2 behaves similar to M1, but provides improvement for

very small training sets
Hmm, still comparable to SmoothNN
Can we get reasonable estimates of
position without any labeled data?
Yes!

Observe signal strengths from existing data

packets (unlabeled by default)

No more running around collecting data..

Over and over.. and over..
 Input
Labeled: training
[(x1,y1),(-40,-55,-90,..)]
[(x2,y2),(-60,-56,-80,..)]
[(x3,y3),(-80,-70,-30,..)]
[(x4,y4),(-64,-33,-70,..)]
Output
Probability distributions
for all the unknowns
Propagation constants
b0i, b1i for each Base Station

Unlabeled: mobile object(s) (x,y) for each (?,?)

[(?,?),(-45,-65,-40,..)]
[(?,?),(-35,-45,-78,..)]
[(?,?),(-75,-55,-65,..)]
 Model 3 (Zero Profiling)
Xi Yi
Same graph as M2 (Hierarchical)
but with (unlabeled data) D1 D2 D3 D4 D5

S1 S2 S3 S4 S5

b01 b11 b02 b12 b03 b13 b04 b14 b05 b15

b
Hmm, why would this work?
[1] Prior knowledge about distance-signal strength

[2] Prior knowledge that access points behave similarly

 Results Close to SmoothNN, BUT…!!

Leave-one-out error (feet)

80
80
Average Error in Feet

UNLABELED
60
60

Zero Profiling M3

SmoothNN
40
40
20
20

0 50 100 150 200 250

0 50 100 150 200 250
Size of input data LABELED
 Other ideas
Corridor Effects Xi Yi
What? RSS is stronger
along corridors

D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
Variable c =1 if the point
shares x or y with the AP S1 S2 S3 S4 S5

No improvements
b1 b2 b3 b4 b5
Informative Prior
distributions
b
Comparison to previous work
Error CDF Across Algorithms
1

0.9

0.8 •More ad-hoc

0.7 •Adaptive
Probability

0.6
•No labor investment
0.5

0.4

0.3
RADAR
0.2 Probabilistic
M1-labeled
M2-labeled
0.1 M3-unlabeled

0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Distance in feet
Conclusion and Future Work
First time to actually use BGM
Considerable promise for localization
Performance comparable to existing approaches
Zero profiling! (can we localize anything with a radio??)

Where are we going?

Other models
Variational approximations
Tracking applications
Minimum extra infrastructure (more information - better
accuracy)!
Thanks! ☺