ZiFind: Exploiting Cross-Technology Interference
Signatures for Energy-Efficient Indoor Localization
Yuhang Gao
State Key Laboratory of Virtual
Reality Technology and Systems,
Beihang University
rainman1919@gmail.com
Jianwei Niu
State Key Laboratory of Virtual
Reality Technology and Systems,
Beihang University
niujianwei@buaa.edu.cn
Ruogu Zhou
Michigan State University
zhouruog@msu.edu
Guoliang Xing
Michigan State University
glxing@msu.edu
Abstract—Indoor localization becomes increasingly important
as context-aware applications gain popularity in mobile users.
A promising approach for indoor localization is to leverage the
pervasive WiFi infrastructure via fingerprinting-based inference.
However, a WiFi device must frequently scan for WiFi signals
during localization, leading to high power consumption. Moreover,
switching to the scanning mode introduces inevitable disruptions
to data communication of WiFi interface. This paper presents
a new indoor localization system called ZiFind that exploits the
cross-technology interference in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz frequency
spectrum. ZiFind utilizes low-power ZigBee interface to collect
WiFi interference signals and adopts digital signal processing
techniques to extract unique signatures as fingerprints for local-
ization. To deal with the noise in the fingerprints, we design a new
learning algorithm called R-KNN that can improve the accuracy of
localization by assigning different weights to fingerprint features
according to their importance. We implement ZiFind on TelosB
motes and evaluate its performance through extensive experiments
in a 16,000 ft
2
office building floor consisting of 28 rooms.
Our results show that ZiFind leads to significant power saving
compared with existing approaches based on WiFi interface, and
yields satisfactory localization accuracy in a range of realistic
settings.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a new class
of context-aware applications for mobile users, ranging from
navigation, search of points of interests, to location-based ad-
vertisement. These applications often rely on the knowledge of
accurate user location to achieve satisfactory quality of service.
However, localization of mobile users in indoor environments
is challenging due to the lack of GPS support.
A promising approach for indoor localization is to leverage
the pervasive WiFi infrastructure [19] [10] [16]. A typical
fingerprinting based WiFi localization scheme works as follows.
A WiFi-enabled device first measures the features of WiFi
signals such as Received Signal Strength (RSS) and SSIDs of
APs. These features are used to find a best match in a database
of WiFi fingerprints tagged with known locations. Compared
with other solutions, this fingerprinting-based approach does not
require specialized hardware or additional infrastructure sup-
port. However, existing WiFi fingerprinting based-localization
systems have several drawbacks when they are used in mobile
applications. First, in order to continuously estimate the location
of mobile user, the WiFi device must frequently scan WiFi chan-
nels to discover available APs, leading to high power consump-
tion. Fig. 1 shows our measurement of current draw of WiFi
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Current draw (mA)
Time (s)
Scanning
idle
Scanning
idle
WiFi NIC
Zigbee radio
Fig. 1. The measurements of current draw of WiFi interface and ZigBee-
compatible TelosB motes in scanning mode.
interface on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop when it periodically runs
a fingerprinting-based localization algorithm [10]. The WiFi
interface consumes more than 40% of the total system power
1
.
Second, the collection of WiFi fingerprints such as RSS requires
WiFi interface to switch to the scanning mode in which data
communication must be disabled. As shown in Fig. 1, a typical
WiFi scan takes about 2-3 seconds
2
. When the mobile user relies
on WiFi for Internet access, frequent mode switching introduces
inevitable disruptions to data communication, resulting in poor
performance for connection-oriented protocols like TCP.
To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a new
indoor localization system called ZiFind. The design of ZiFind
exploits the cross-technology interference in the unlicensed
2.4 GHz frequency spectrum. The adoption of 2.4 GHz radio
spectrum has led to the proliferation of inexpensive commercial
off-the-shelf WiFi, Bluetooth and ZigBee devices. Such co-
existence of multiple wireless technologies in the same frequen-
cy band is deemed as a “curse” as it often causes significant
interference [12]. In this work, we exploit the interference of
WiFi on low-power technologies such as ZigBee and Bluetooth
as a “blessing”. In our approach, mobile user utilizes a low-
power ZigBee interface to detect the unique interference sig-
natures induced by the WiFi infrastructure and uses them as
fingerprints to estimate the current location. Compared with
the existing WiFi-based localization methods, our approach
1
Our current draw measurement is consistent with the results of previous
studies [21].
2
Our delay measurement is similar with the result in [10].