Computationally tractable location estimation on WiFi enabled mobile phones

Enriching a mobile device with the ability to detect its location can enable the provision of a range of Location Based Services to its user. Outdoors, the location detection facility is sufficiently provided by GPS, however GPS is not suited to the challenge of non-line-of-sight indoor environments. In these environments smaller scale location estimation techniques must be employed. Due to their ubiquity, WiFi signals are a commonly employed indicator of location; knowledge of the identity and intensity of these signals throughout an environment can allow the estimation of the receiving device´s location. This paper outlines work towards the development of efficient, privacy conservative positioning algorithms suitable for deployment on commonly available mobile phones. For a number of algorithms, the frequency of correct location prediction is presented along with the execution time on a real mobile phone.