Although indoor localization is a key topic for mobile computing, it is still very difficult for the mobile sensing community to compare state-of-art localization algorithms due to the scarcity of databases. Thus, a multi-building and multi-floor localization database based on WLAN fingerprinting is presented in this work, being its public access granted for the research community. The here proposed database not only is the biggest database in the literature but it is also the first publicly available database. Among other comprehensively described features, full raw information taken by more than 20 users and by means of 25 devices is provided.

An accurate and reliable Indoor Positioning System (IPS) applicable to most indoor scenarios has been sought for many years. The number of technologies, techniques, and approaches in general used in IPS proposals is remarkable. Such diversity, coupled with the lack of strict and verifiable evaluations, leads to difficulties for appreciating the true value of most proposals. This paper provides a meta-review that performed a comprehensive compilation of 62 survey papers in the area of indoor positioning. The paper provides the reader with an introduction to IPS and the different technologies, techniques, and some methods commonly employed. The introduction is supported by consensus found in the selected surveys and referenced using them. Thus, the meta-review allows the reader to inspect the IPS current state at a glance and serve as a guide for the reader to easily find further details on each technology used in IPS. The analyses of the meta-review contributed with insights on the abundance and academic significance of published IPS proposals using the criterion of the number of citations. Moreover, 75 works are identified as relevant works in the research topic from a selection of about 4000 works cited in the analyzed surveys.

Benchmark open-source Wi-Fi fingerprinting datasets for indoor positioning studies are still hard to find in the current literature and existing public repositories. This is unlike other research fields, such as the image processing field, where benchmark test images such as the Lenna image or Face Recognition Technology (FERET) databases exist, or the machine learning field, where huge datasets are available for example at the University of California Irvine (UCI) Machine Learning Repository. It is the purpose of this paper to present a new openly available Wi-Fi fingerprint dataset, comprised of 4648 fingerprints collected with 21 devices in a university building in Tampere, Finland, and to present some benchmark indoor positioning results using these data. The datasets and the benchmarking software are distributed under the open-source MIT license and can be found on the EU Zenodo repository.

WiFi fingerprinting, one of the most popular methods employed in indoor positioning, currently faces two major problems: lack of robustness to short and long time signal changes and difficult reproducibility of new methods presented in the relevant literature. This paper presents a WiFi RSS (Received Signal Strength) database created to foster and ease research works that address the above-mentioned two problems. A trained professional took several consecutive fingerprints while standing at specific positions and facing specific directions. The consecutive fingerprints may enable the study of short-term signals variations. The data collection spanned over 15 months, and, for each month, one type of training datasets and five types of test datasets were collected. The measurements of a dataset type (training or test) were taken at the same positions and directions every month, in order to enable the analysis of long-term signal variations. The database is provided with supporting materials and software, which give more information about the collection environment and eases the database utilization, respectively. The WiFi measurements and the supporting materials are available at the Zenodo repository under the open-source MIT license.