Wi-Fi positioning system1

Wi-Fi-based positioning system (WPS) or WiPS/WFPS is used where GPS is

inadequate due to various causes including multipath and signal blockage indoors. Such
systems include indoor positioning systems2 (IPS). An IPS is a system to locate
objects or people inside a building using radio waves, magnetic fields, acoustic signals,
or other sensory information collected by mobile devices. There are several commercial
systems on the market, but there is no standard for an IPS system.
In computing, a wireless intrusion prevention system (WIPS) is a network device that monitors the radio spectrum
for the presence of unauthorized access points (intrusion detection), and can automatically take countermeasures
(intrusion prevention).
WFPS is a FM radio station in Freeport, Illinois, operating on an assigned frequency of 92.1 megahertz as authorized
by the Federal Communications Commission.

Wi-Fi positioning takes advantage of the rapid growth in the early 21st century of
wireless access points in urban areas.
The localization technique used for positioning with wireless access points is based on
measuring the intensity of the received signal (Received Signal Strength or RSS) and
the method of "fingerprinting". Typical parameters useful to geolocate the Wi-Fi
hotspot or wireless access point include the SSID and the MAC address of the access
point. The accuracy depends on the number of positions that have been entered into the
database. The Wi-Fi hotspot database gets filled by correlating mobile device GPS
location data with Wi-Fi hotspot MAC addresses.
In telecommunications, Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is a measurement of the power present in a
received radio signal. RSSI is usually invisible to a user of a receiving device. However, because signal strength can
vary greatly and impact functionality in wireless networking, IEEE 802.11 devices often make the measure available
to users.
IEEE 802.113 is a set of Media Access Control (MAC) and PHYsical layer (PHY) specifications for implementing
wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6, 5, and 60 GHz frequency bands. They
are created and maintained by the IEEE LAN/MAN Standards Committee (IEEE 802). The base version of the
standard was released in 1997, and has had subsequent amendments. The standard and amendments provide the basis
for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand. While each amendment is officially revoked when it is
incorporated in the latest version of the standard, the corporate world tends to market to the revisions because they
concisely denote capabilities of their products. IEEE 802.11b-19994 or 802.11b, is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11
wireless networking specification that extends throughput up to 11 Mbit/s using the same 2.4GHz band. 802.11b is
used in a point-to-multipoint configuration, wherein an access point communicates via an omnidirectional antenna
with mobile clients within the range of the access point. Typical range depends on the radio frequency environment,
output power and sensitivity of the receiver. Allowable bandwidth is shared across clients in discrete channels. A
directional antenna focuses output power into a smaller field which increases point-to-point range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indoor_positioning_system
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11b-1999
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In computer science, a fingerprinting algorithm5 is a procedure that maps an arbitrarily large data item to a much
shorter bit string, its fingerprint, that uniquely identifies the original data for all practical purposes just as human
fingerprints uniquely identify people for practical purposes.
Service sets have an associated identifier, the Service Set Identifier (SSID)6, which consists of 32 octets that
frequently contains a human readable identifier of the network.

IPS systems use different technologies, including distance measurement (intensity of

the received signal) to nearby anchor nodes (nodes with known positions, e.g., WiFi
access points), magnetic positioning7, dead reckoning8. They either actively locate
mobile devices and tags or provide ambient location or environmental context for
devices to get sensed. The localized nature of an IPS has resulted in design
fragmentation, with systems making use of various optical, radio, or even acoustic
technologies.
Magnetic positioning is an IPS solution based on magnetic sensor data from a smartphone used to wirelessly locate
objects or people inside a building. Magnetic positioning appears to be the most complete and cost effective. It offers
accuracy without any hardware requirements and a relatively low total cost of ownership. Noticing that buildings'
magnetic distortions were leading machines astray, they eventually turned the problem around and focused attention
on the magnetic interferences caused by steel structures. The disturbances inside them were consistent, creating a
magnetic fingerprint unique to a building. A smartphone can be used as a magnetic field detector: it is used to
measure magnetic field, it shows current magnetic field values (X, Y, Z) and the length of the vector (X, Y, Z) by a
value to show how strong the magnetic is.
In navigation, dead reckoning is the process of calculating one's current position by using a previously determined
position, or fix, and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time and course.
Dead reckoning is subject to cumulative errors. Advances in navigational aids that give accurate information on
position, in particular satellite navigation using the Global Positioning System (GPS), have made simple dead
reckoning by humans obsolete for most purposes. However, Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), which provides
very accurate directional information, use dead reckoning and are very widely applied. Dead reckoning can give the
best available information on position, but is subject to significant errors due to many factors as both speed and
direction must be accurately known at all instants for position to be determined accurately. The accuracy of dead
reckoning can be increased significantly by using other, more reliable methods to get a new fix part way through
the journey (nodes with known positions and/or magnetic positioning). For example if one was navigating on
land in poor visibility, dead reckoning could be used to get close enough to the known position of a landmark to be
able to see it, before walking to the landmark itself - giving a precisely known start point - and then setting off again.
Localizing a static sensor node is not a difficult task because attaching a GPS device suffices the need of
localization: a limited number of reference nodes (with GPS) within a field. These nodes continuously broadcast their
locations and other nodes in proximity receive these locations and calculate their position using some mathematical
technique like trilateration. Several localization algorithms based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method have
been proposed in literatures. Sometimes a node at some places receive only two known locations and hence it
becomes impossible to localize. To overcome this problem, dead reckoning technique is used. With this technique a
sensor node uses its previous calculated location for localization at later time intervals. For example, at time instant 1
if node A calculates its position as loca_1 with the help of three known reference locations; then at time instant 2 it
uses loca_1 along with two other reference locations received from other two reference nodes. This not only localizes
a node in less time but also localizes in positions where it is difficult to get three reference locations. Dead reckoning
is today implemented in some high-end automotive navigation systems in order to overcome the limitations of
GPS/GNSS technology alone. Satellite microwave signals are unavailable in parking garages and tunnels, and often
severely degraded in urban canyons and near trees due to blocked lines of sight to the satellites or multipath
propagation. In a dead-reckoning navigation system, the car is equipped with sensors that know the wheel diameter
and record wheel rotations and steering direction. These sensors are often already present in cars for other purposes
(anti-lock braking system, electronic stability control) and can be read by the navigation system from the controller5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerprint_(computing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_set_(802.11_network)
7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_positioning
8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning
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area network (CAN) bus. The navigation system then uses a Kalman filter to integrate the always-available sensor
data with the accurate but occasionally unavailable position information from the satellite data into a combined
position fix. With the increased sensor offering in smartphones, built-in accelerometers can be used as a pedometer
and built-in magnetometer as a compass heading provider.
Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) can be used to supplement other navigation methods in a similar way to
automotive navigation, or to extend navigation into areas where other navigation systems are unavailable. In a simple
implementation, the user holds their phone in front of them and each step causes position to move forward a fixed
distance in the direction measured by the compass. Accuracy is limited by the sensor precision, magnetic
disturbances inside structures, and unknown variables such as carrying position and stride length. Another challenge
is differentiating walking from running, and recognizing movements like bicycling, climbing stairs, or riding an
elevator. Before phone-based systems existed, many custom PDR systems existed. While a pedometer can only be
used to measure linear distance traveled, PDR systems have embedded magnetometer for heading measurement.
Custom PDR systems can take many forms including special boots, belts, and watches, where the variability of
carrying position has been minimized to better utilize magnetometer heading. True dead reckoning is fairly
complicated, as it is not only important to minimize basic drift, but also to handle different carrying scenarios and
movements, as well as hardware differences across phone models. Based on the physiological characteristics of
pedestrian movement, we can use the cyclical characteristics and statistics of acceleration waveform and features
which are associated with the walking speed to estimate the stride length. Moreover, the heading is obtained from the
integration of gyroscope or from the combination of magnetometer and accelerometer. Due to the randomness of
pedestrian hand-held way, the attitude angle of a smartphone cannot be constant. Hence, the accuracy of heading can
be guaranteed only after the real-time attitude angle has been calculated. Therefore, the way to obtain an accurate
attitude angle solution in different environmental conditions without the external absolute reference signals forms one
of the significant challenges to be concerned. There are two categories of algorithms for attitude angle updating by
using the angular rate of gyroscope: the Euler angle algorithm and the quaternion algorithm. The Euler angle
algorithm relies on the Euler angle differential equations to calculate the yaw, pitch, and roll angles. Since the pitch
angle in Euler angles can result to degenerations, the yaw and roll angles cannot be determined uniquely when the
pitch angle is close to 90. The quaternion algorithm avoids the singularity problem involved in Euler angles by
solving four linear differential equations. On this basis, the quaternion algorithm is featured with simple computation
cost and is easy to be operated for a wide application. In quaternion algorithm, since the gyroscope is suffered by the
accumulated measurement errors, it is not effective to measure the angles over a long period of time. To obtain a
stable and reliable attitude angle, the gyroscope should be integrated with accelerometer and magnetometer. To this
end, the complementary filter, Kalman filter, and gradient descent algorithm are widely used to conduct data fusion.
The quaternion-based extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm is recognized to be more accurate, but more system
state vectors and higher computation cost are required, which is not appropriate for the real-time processing
on a smartphone platform. There is significant accuracy deterioration by using the aforementioned conventional
algorithms when a large linear acceleration occurs or the magnetometer is seriously interfered by the surrounding
noise, such as the blocking by iron products. To solve this problem, a new pedestrian dead reckoning-based
MARG navigation algorithm9 is presented, which is highly accurate and is easy to be implemented on smartphones.
See also10.

System designs must take into account that at least three independent measurements are
needed to unambiguously find a location (trilateration).
In geometry, trilateration is the process of determining absolute or relative locations of points by measurement of
distances, using the geometry of circles, spheres or triangles. In addition to its interest as a geometric problem,
trilateration does have practical applications in surveying and navigation, including global positioning systems (GPS).
In contrast to triangulation, it does not involve the measurement of angles. In two-dimensional geometry, it is known
that if a point lies on two circles, then the circle centers and the two radii provide sufficient information to narrow the
possible locations down to two. Additional information may narrow the possibilities down to one unique location. In
three-dimensional geometry, when it is known that a point lies on the surfaces of three spheres, then the centers of the
three spheres along with their radii provide sufficient information to narrow the possible locations down to no more

http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2014/1/65
http://www.ipin2014.org/wp/pdf/3A-4.pdf

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than two (unless the centers lie on a straight line). This resume11 describes a method for determining the intersections
of three sphere surfaces given the centers and radii of the three spheres.

Many of wireless geolocation techniques are based on such information as TOA (the
time of arrival), TDOA (the time difference of arrival), and DOA (the direction of
arrival). But geolocation based on these techniques is reliable only when line-of-sight
signals are dominant, hence it will not be applicable to an indoor environment.
Furthermore, a TOA or TDOA based approach requires accurate synchronization
between transmitters and receivers. An alternative12 geolocation method is a signal
strength based approach. Instead of measuring the time or angle of signal arrival, the
signal strength method makes use of the level of signal power (or energy) sensed by a
mobile station regarding the signals transmitted by reference base stations or APs
(access points in the IEEE802.11 terminology). This signal strength based approach
may be also possible in a reversed situation, where the signal from an MS is sensed by
multiple APs. This second approach would relieve an individual mobile station from the
task of computing its position or processing and transferring relevant information to
some BS (base station) or AP, as would be required in the first approach. However, a set
of signals from different mobile stations must be designed in such a manner that APs
can distinguish the signals from different mobile stations. In this case, a simple signal
propagation model which is based on a signal predictor variable can be used, where the
observed variable is the signal strength (in dBm), and the predictor (or controlled)
variable is the distance from a reference position (also in logarithm), and the main
parameter to be estimated (i.e., regression coefficient) is the exponent value a that
determines path loss of the signal when the distance from the signal source is given13:
an empirical signal propagation model can be used; which is based on a linear
regression analysis and in which the observed variable of signal strength has been
compensated for the attenuation caused by the walls intervening between the mobile
station and AP before applied to the regression analysis. This linear regression model
11

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateration
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2002.996891
13
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/69694/tr-99-12.pdf
12

can be extending to a multiple regression model by adding another predictor variable,

i.e., the wall attenuation factor. There may exist walls intervening between a possible
mobile station location (to be estimated in geolocation) and a given reference position.
Since received signal strength indication (RSSI) information is available in all mobile
phones, RSSI-based techniques have become the preferred method for GSM
localization (the idea here is not use a method based on GSM). Although the GSM
standard allows for a mobile phone to receive signal strength information from up to
seven base stations, most of mobile phones only use the information of the associated
cell as its estimated position. Therefore, the accuracy of GSM localization is seriously
limited. In this way, an algorithm for GSM localization14 is proposed with RSSI and
Pearsons correlation coefficient (PCC). The information of seven cells, including the
serving cell and six neighboring cells, is used to accurately estimate the mobile
location. With redundant information, the proposed algorithm restrains the error of CellID and shows good robustness against environmental change. Without any additional
device or prior statistical knowledge, the proposed algorithm is implementable on
common mobile devices (MS).

For smoothing to compensate for stochastic (unpredictable) errors there must be a sound
method for reducing the error budget significantly. The system might include
information from other systems to cope for physical ambiguity and to enable error
compensation.
The possible signal fluctuations that may occur can increase errors and inaccuracies in
the path of the user. To minimize fluctuations in the received signal, there are certain
techniques that can be applied to filter the noise. In the case of low precision, some
techniques have been proposed to merge the Wi-Fi traces with other data sources such
as geographical information and time constraints (i.e., time geography).

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/157046