The Design and Implementation of a Wireless Location Estimation System in a Wireless Local Area Network

We have already developed embedded software in off-the-shelf WLAN APs, our system can sniff out data packets transmitted by WLAN devices without the need to install client programs on mobile user devices. Experiment results show that once wireless activities had been detected, our signal strength based localization algorithm can estimate positions of the wireless mobile devices involved with great success rate and good accuracy. Based upon our previous research result, better design and implementation to our Wireless Location Estimation become our next challenging objective. A well designed system will minimize the traffic within the network, as well as the chance of being overload the estimation system. Since more than a hundred packets are transferred in the air within a second, huge amount of packet details such as MAC address of the mobile station and the corresponding RSSI is difficult to be transferred to the data server at once. Besides, the problem is amplified when more than one WLAN APs want to transmit all the packet information to the data server at the same time. Hence, a more technically advance software design in off-the-shelf WLAN APs is needed. Thus, the design and implementation of an intelligence wireless data summarization, data storage middle-ware machine, optimized data server and location estimation server, are our major concern in terms of stability, flexibility and performance.