Hybrid WLAN-RFID Indoor Localization Solution Utilizing Textile Tag

Abstract

This letter presents a novel hybrid configuration for indoor positioning, utilizing the passive radio frequency identification (RFID) and wireless local area network (WLAN). Our architecture is based on a mobile device with a WLAN receiver, a textile RFID tag, and one or several RFID readers communicating with the mobile. The proposed passive textile RFID tag provides a very cost effective, power efficient, and easily implemented solution for human positioning and tracking applications. In addition, the joint utilization of two technologies increases the accuracy of the indoor positioning service. Our main contribution comes from the innovative RFID-WLAN hybrid architecture based on received signal strengths and able to improve the localization accuracy compared to pure RFID and pure WLAN location solutions. The proposed algorithm is tested with real-field measurements.