Atmospheric pressure-aware seamless 3-D localization and navigation for mobile Internet devices

This paper describes a seamless three-dimensional (3-D) localization and navigation system for smartphones. The smartphone includes an atmospheric pressure sensor to measure the user's altitude that is combined with the outdoor Global Positioning System (GPS) and indoor WiFi-APs localization systems in a seamless 3-D localization system. The smartphone software also provides seamless navigation services by updating map information for both indoor and outdoor locations through the mobile Internet. The indoor floor information calculated from the altitude information is used to project localization anchor nodes, e.g., WiFi-AP, on different floors onto the user's floor with an indoor 3-D localization algorithm using projection distances based on a Received Signal Strength (RSS) algorithm. Tests show that the 3-D method reduces systematic errors and achieves much higher accuracy than the traditional two-dimensional localization method.