  Indoor localization in multi-floor buildings is an important research
problem. Finding the correct floor, in a fast and efficient manner, in a
shopping mall or an unknown university building can save the users' search time
and can enable a myriad of Location Based Services in the future. One of the
most widely spread techniques for floor estimation in multi-floor buildings is
the fingerprinting-based localization using Received Signal Strength (RSS)
measurements coming from indoor networks, such as WLAN and BLE. The clear
advantage of RSS-based floor estimation is its ease of implementation on a
multitude of mobile devices at the Application Programming Interface (API)
level, because RSS values are directly accessible through API interface.
However, the downside of a fingerprinting approach, especially for large-scale
floor estimation and positioning solutions, is their need to store and transmit
a huge amount of fingerprinting data. The problem becomes more severe when the
localization is intended to be done on mobile devices which have limited
memory, power, and computational resources. An alternative floor estimation
method, which has lower complexity and is faster than the fingerprinting is the
Weighted Centroid Localization (WCL) method. The trade-off is however paid in
terms of a lower accuracy than the one obtained with traditional fingerprinting
with Nearest Neighbour (NN) estimates. In this paper a novel K-means-based
method for floor estimation via fingerprint clustering of WiFi and various
other positioning sensor outputs is introduced. Our method achieves a floor
estimation accuracy close to the one with NN fingerprinting, while
significantly improves the complexity and the speed of the floor detection
algorithm. The decrease in the database size is achieved through storing and
transmitting only the cluster heads (CH's) and their corresponding floor
labels.
