Accuracy Charaterization for Metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi Localization

Yet another excellent Place Lab publication. Accuracy Charaterization for Metropolitan-scale Wi-Fi Localization talks about the feasibility of building and the accuracy of a wede-area 802.11 Wi-Fi-based positioning system with very little calibration overhead. Their experiment show that the can estimate a user’s position with a median positioning error of 13-40 meters (depending upon the characteristics of the environment). They point out that building and deploying location-aware application that are usable by a wide variety of people in everyday situations is arguably no easier now than it was ten year ago. Moreover, most current location systems do not work where people spend much of their time. GPS does not work indoors and works poorly in many cities where the so called “urban canyons” form by building prevent GPS units from seeing enough satellites to get a position lock. They prone a mix approach to positioning to reach ubiquitous availability of location information.