Inferring Locations of Mobile Devices from Wi-Fi Data

Leon Wu, Ying Zhu

Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Canada.

DOI: 10.4236/iim.2015.72006                

Abstract

Mobile phones are becoming a primary platform for information access. A major aspect of ubiquitous computing is context-aware applications which collect information about the environment that the user is in and use this information to provide better service and improve user experience. Location awareness makes certain applications possible, e.g., recommending nearby businesses and tracking estimated routes. An Android application is able to collect useful Wi-Fi information without registering a location listener with a network-based provider. We passively collected the data of the IDs of Wi-Fi access points and the received signal strengths. We developed and implemented an algorithm to analyse the data; and designed heuristics to infer the location of the device over time—all without ever connecting to the network thus maximally preserving the privacy of the user.

Keywords

Location Awareness, Mobile Device, Data Analysis, Data Inference

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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