John Krumm on WiFi Positioning

John Krumm of Microsoft Research gives an interview on Wi-Fi positioning, based on the paper he co-wrote Accuracy Characterization for Metropolitan-Scale Wi-Fi Localization with other Place Lab members. He goes exactly in the same direction I took for developing CatchBob!. That is WiFi positioning is of 13-40 meters in an uncontrolled urban and residential environment, measuring the signal strength is almost useless, and complicated algorithms are not more accurate.

Using Wi-Fi to Make Your Device Find Where You Are interview of John Krumm by Rob Knies.

We learned that we can estimate the location of a mobile Wi-Fi device to an accuracy of 13-40 meters, depending on the environment, using just the access points that are already deployed in urban and residential neighborhoods.

We found that measuring the signal strength of Wi-Fi access points really doesn’t help that much in estimating position.

One of the pleasant conclusions from our study is that, for this task, a simple algorithm worked almost as well as a much more complicated one.