Integrity monitoring and mobile implementation aspects of WLAN positioning

Location technologies constitute an essential component of systems design for autonomous operations and control. The Global Positioning System (GPS) works well in outdoor areas, but the satellite signals are not strong enough to penetrate inside most indoor environments. As a result, a new strain of indoor positioning technologies that make use of 802.11 wireless LANs (WLAN) appeared. Contemporary WLAN positioning maintains the database of location fingerprints which is used to identify the most likely match of incoming signal data with those preliminary surveyed and saved in the database. An issue with these systems, however, is the operation robustness. This paper investigates the issue of deploying WLAN positioning software on mobile platforms and studies an integrity monitoring technique to account for unstable signal characteristics, which are often observable in WLAN. Integrity monitoring algorithms can handle the redundancy of APs to identify “rogue” ones, isolate them and improve system robustness.