IONavi: An Indoor-Outdoor Navigation Service via Mobile Crowdsensing

The proliferation of mobile computing has prompted navigation to be one of the most attractive and promising applications. Conventional designs of navigation systems mainly focus on either indoor or outdoor navigation. However, people have a strong need for navigation from a large open indoor environment to an outdoor destination in real life. This article presents IONavi, a joint navigation solution, which can enable passengers to easily deploy indoor-outdoor navigation service for subway transportation systems in a crowdsourcing way. Any self-motivated passenger records and shares individual walking traces from a location inside a subway station to an uncertain outdoor destination within a given range, such as one kilometer. IONavi further extracts navigation traces from shared individual traces, each of which is not necessary to be accurate. A subsequent following user achieves indoor-outdoor navigation services by tracking a recommended navigation trace. Extensive experiments are conducted on a subway transportation system. The experimental results indicate that IONavi exhibits outstanding navigation performance from an uncertain location inside a subway station to an outdoor destination. Although IONavi is to enable indoor-outdoor navigation for subway transportation systems, the basic idea can naturally be extended to joint navigation from other open indoor environments to outdoor environments.