Location Tracking and Location Based Service Using IEEE 802.11 WLAN Infrastructure*

Location tracking systems including the GPS, Active Badge, Bat, SmartFloor and Cricket systems attracted a significant group of researchers during the recent decades. Whatever the coverage and accuracy of these systems are, they all depend on customized hardware and/or trained personnel for implementation. Our aim in this study was to develop a solution that will not be hardware dependent and easy to deploy. In this paper, we propose a pure software based solution, namely WLAN Tracker, which is based on the signal strength measureme nts from different wireless access points (WAPs). Unlike similar systems, WLAN Tracker is designed to operate in multistory buildings. Moreover, as a demonstrative example, a simple location based service (LBS) is added to WLAN Tracker in order to provide text-based services to its clients. We investigate the performance of our system by comparing its location estimations with real values.