Implementation of Location Determination in a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Environment

Wireless local area network (WLAN) is developed to complement the wired network. Various standards for WLAN exist, but the most common standards are IEEE 802.11b and 802.11g. Since WLAN provides the mobility to the network users, there was some interesting in determine the location for the users. IEEE 802.11 standards did not support the location services. This paper tries to implement the three methods to add location services to the WLAN. The three main localization techniques adopted were close access points (AP), propagation method and radio map. The signal from three access points were monitored using software developed in Java and Matlab. The experiments were taken in real time at UKM Mercator Office and its multimedia laboratory. In general, the real time AP location was successfully determined with reasonable error.