SUNS: A User-Friendly Scheme for Seamless and Ubiquitous Navigation Based on an Enhanced Indoor-Outdoor Environmental Awareness Approach

Abstract

Ubiquitous and seamless indoor-outdoor (I/O) localization is the primary objective for gaining more user satisfaction and sustaining the prosperity of the location-based services (LBS) market. Regular users, on the other hand, may be unaware of the impact of activating multiple localization sources on localization performance and energy consumption, or may lack experience deciding when to enable or disable localization sources in different environments. Consequently, an automatic handover mechanism that can handle these decisions on a user’s behalf can appreciably improve user satisfaction. This study introduces an enhanced I/O environmental awareness service that provides an automated handover mechanism for seamless navigation based on multi-sensory navigation integration schemes. Moreover, the proposed service utilizes low-power consumption sensor (LPCS) indicators to execute continuous detection tasks and invoke GNSS in confusion scenarios, and transition intervals to make the most firm decision on the credibility of the LPCS-triggered transition and compensate for indicator thresholds. In this manner, GNSS are used for short intervals that help reduce detection latency and power consumption. Consequently, the proposed service guarantees accurate and reliable I/O detection while preserving low power consumption. Leveraging the proposed service as an automated handover helped realize seamless indoor-outdoor localization with less switching latency, using an integrated solution based on extended Kalman filter. Furthermore, the proposed energy-efficient service was utilized to confine crowdsourced data collection to the required areas (indoors and semi-indoors) and prevent excess data collection outdoors, thereby reducing power drainage. Accordingly, the negative impact of data collection on the user’s device can be mitigated, participation can be encouraged, and crowdsourcing systems can be widely adopted.