LocAP: Accurate Localization of Existing WiFi Infrastructure

Shrivatsan Rajagopalan, Shreya Ganesaraman, Aravind Seetharaman, Roshan Ayyalasomayajula, Aditya Arun, Chenfeng Wu, Dinesh Bharadia

Abstract

Indoor localization has been studied for nearly two decades fueled by wide interest in indoor navigation, achieving the necessary decimeter-level accuracy. However, there are no real-world deployments of WiFi-based user localization algorithms, primarily because these algorithms are triangulation based and therefore assume the location of the Access Points, their antenna geometries, and deployment orientations in the physical map. In the real world, such detailed knowledge of the location attributes of the Access Point is seldom available, thereby making WiFi localization hard to deploy. In this paper, for the first time, we establish the accuracy requirements for the location attributes of access points to achieve decimeter level user localization accuracy. Surprisingly, these requirements for antenna geometries and deployment orientation are very stringent, requiring millimeter level and sub-10 degree of accuracy respectively, which is hard to achieve with manual effort. To ease the deployment of real-world WiFi localization, we present LocAP, which is an autonomous system to physically map the environment and accurately locate the attributes of existing infrastructure AP in the physical space down to the required stringent accuracy of 3 mm antenna separation and 3degree deployment orientation median errors, whereas state-of-the-art report 150 mm and 25degrees respectively.

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