Please Stand By: TV-based Indoor Localization

Despite the decades of efforts, indoor positioning remains an open research challenge. While existing solutions already demonstrate high accuracy, their in-building infrastructure - such as Wi-Fi access points or Bluetooth beacons - provides only a limited coverage. This paper investigates feasibility of accurate indoor positioning using broadcast digital TV signals, readily available in populated areas worldwide. We experiment with the classic received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting, and introduce a novel approach based on channel state information (CSI), which leverages frequency-selective multipath fading of wideband TV signals. The proposed methods are experimentally evaluated on an extensive dataset of DVB-T signals, systematically collected in two large buildings over the course of 8 months. The results show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms RSS fingerprinting and achieves 92-98% localization accuracy. While this study is based on the European DVB-T signals, the proposed method is directly generalizable to other TV standards (such as ATSC, ISDB, DTMB and DMB) and wide-area TV white space (TVWS) networks.