A Hybrid Positioning System for Location-Based Services: Design and Implementation

In this article, we propose a hybrid positioning system (HPS) for various seamless localization applications. The base stations in the HPS incorporate four wireless protocols, namely, WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and utral-wideband (UWB); as a result, the HPS shows better target detection because it can localize persons/ objects with different positioning devices (e.g., smartphone, UWB tag, Bluetooth tag) simultaneously. Moreover, it also exhibits good environmental adaptability because it can be deployed in different environments. We first present the system architecture of our HPS and then delve into the main hardware constituents. We detail the functions of each protocol for efficient positioning. The main motivation behind the design of our HPS is to realize a robust and precise indoor and outdoor seamless positioning system that is universally deployable from small to large-scale environments. Our HPS can effectively compensate for the shortcomings of existing standalone positioning systems and provide sufficient space for information fusion to yield more accurate positioning. Experimental results in a typical office environment have demonstrated the superiority of our proposed HPS in comparison with different fusion strategies. Two case studies are included to validate the powerful functions for providing personalized location- based services.