Open Wireless Positioning System: A Wi-Fi-Based Indoor Positioning System

Wireless network positioning is the main pillar of the continuity of rich and mobile multimedia applications. Good position accuracy is particularly difficult to obtain in urban or leafy areas and indoors or in mixed (both indoor and outdoor) environments. A system proposing such positioning must localize any mobile terminal accurately within hostile environments and ideally be low-cost and easy to deploy. We propose an indoor positioning system, based on the IEEE 802.11 wireless network. This system, named OWLPS (Open WireLess Positioning System), implements several of the major mobile position computation algorithms and techniques: fin- gerprinting location, topology-based and viterbi-like algorithm, propagation models. These algorithms result from community work and our personal researches. Index Terms—Wireless LAN, Radio position measurement, Indoor radio communication