Mauro Brunato, Csaba Kiss Kalló

Transparent Location Fingerprinting for Wireless Services

Dipartimento di Informatica e Telecomunicazioni,
Università di Trento
via Sommarive 14
I-38050 Pantè di Povo (TN)
Italy

Email: brunato|kkcsaba@science.unitn.it

Med-hoc-net, Hotel Chia Laguna (CA), 4-6/9/2002

Abstract:

Detecting the user location is crucial in a wireless environment,
not only for the choice of first-hop communication partners, but
also for many auxiliary purposes: Quality of Service (availability
of information in the right place for reduced congestion/delay,
establishment of the optimal path), energy consumption, automated
insertion of location-dependent info into a web query issued by a
user (for example a tourist asking informations about a monument
or a restaurant, a fireman approaching a disaster area).

The technique we propose in our investigation tries to meet two main
goals: transparency to the network and independence from the environment.
A user entering an environment (for instance a wireless-networked building)
shall be able to use his own portable equipment to build a personal map of
the environment without the system even noticing it.

Preliminary tests allow us to detect position on a map with an average
uncertainty of two meters when using information gathered from three
IEEE802.11 access points in an indoor environment composed of many rooms
on a 625sqm area. Performance is expected to improve when more access
points will be exploited in the test area. Implementation of the same
techniques on Bluetooth are also being studied.