An Accurate and Fast WLAN User Location Estimation Method Based on Received Signal Strength

Location estimation is a crucial component of location-aware applications. Positioning based on received signal strength (RSS) in wireless networks is considered a promising and inexpensive solution. Existing techniques only use RSS from some fixed access points (APs) deployed within the area of interest to estimate user location. Through experiments on the properties of RSS, it is found that RSS from far access points can distinguish different locations more easily. In this paper, we propose to introduce RSS from APs outside of the area to increase location estimation accuracy. We also present an online maximum matching method to select the most possible locations first, thus reducing the computational cost incurred by using more RSS values and improving the speed of location estimation. Our new location estimation method is implemented and compared with related work in a practical wireless network. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method can give a higher degree of accuracy.