TITLE:
Inferring Locations of Mobile Devices from Wi-Fi Data
AUTHORS:
Leon Wu, Ying Zhu
KEYWORDS:
Location Awareness, Mobile Device, Data Analysis, Data Inference
JOURNAL NAME:
Intelligent Information Management,
Vol.7 No.2,
March
5,
2015
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.