A new approach for indoor customer tracking based on a single Wi-Fi connection

Wi-Fi and smartphone based location tracking technologies have been widely applied in location based services (LBS). This research is a part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project required by a large global shopping mall company located in Australia. It aims to develop an effective customer tracking approach for acquiring shopping behavior of customers and providing them better services. Currently, the log data provided by the company only recorded one Wi-Fi connection at a time for one smartphone user. This makes most of the conventional tracking and positioning methods inapplicable. In order to solve this problem, a new approach was developed, which takes advantage of both the cell of origin (CoO) method and the fingerprinting method. Its implementation mainly includes two phases: 1) the cell determination phase, including partitioning of the floors of the shopping mall using a Voronoi diagram and determining a unique cell for each wireless access point (AP), adjusting the cells manually according to the real floor layout, obstructions as well as an on-site observing and calibrating process. An AP-shop/room matching table and other relevant information are stored in a database; and 2) the user location tracking phase, including determination of the cell that the customer locates in according to the detected AP linked with the customer's mobile phone. A back-tracing method is also used to improve the tracking performance. This new approach was tested in a large shopping-mall-like space covering an area of 1000 square meters, containing 8 simulated shops and 11 APs. The results showed a 96% correct detection rate whilst the 4% erroneous detections occurred when a user was near the cell boundaries. This new approach is also easy to implement and integrate with other location tracking systems.