Indoor 802.1x based location determination and real-time tracking

Location awareness is an important capability for a series of wirelessly-enhanced business and consumer mobile applications. Low-cost devices/software that can be incorporated into a broad range of business and consumer appliances can be used for location determination and tracking. In this paper, we demonstrate a radio beacon-based approach that suggests wireless 802.1x networks can be joined together to provide indoor tracking capability. Our implementation is based on probabilistic and statistical techniques, where signal strengths measurements from active Access Points (AP) are used to estimate the user´s location. Simulation results and field tests inside Lancaster University InfoLab21 building show that these techniques can achieve good performance (average accuracy less than 2 m) compared with traditional deterministic methods (i.e. triangulation).