Practical robust localization over large-scale 802.11 wireless networks

We demonstrate a system built using probabilistic techniques that allows for remarkably accurate localization across our entire office building using nothing more than the built-in signal intensity meter supplied by standard 802.11 cards. While prior systems have required significant investments of human labor to build a detailed signal map, we can train our system by spending less than one minute per office or region, walking around with a laptop and recording the observed signal intensities of our building’s unmodified base stations. We actually collected over two minutes of data per office or region, about 28 man-hours of effort. Using less than half of this data to train the localizer, we can localize a user to the precise, correct location in over 95% of our attempts, across the entire building. Even in the most pathological cases, we almost never localize a user any more distant than to the neighboring office. A user can obtain this level of accuracy with only two or thr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: MOBICOM
• Authors: Andreas Haeberlen, Eliot Flannery, Andrew M. Ladd, Algis Rudys, Dan S. Wallach, Lydia E. Kavraki
• Keywords: Entire Office Building, MOBICOM 2004, Signal Intensity, Signal Intensity Meter