Design of an indoor wireless user localization and tracking system

In recent years, with the increase in mobile computing devices and wireless local area networks there is a growing interest in location-aware wireless systems and services. Global positioning systems, which serve as the standard for outdoor localization and tracking, do not work indoors because the satellite signal is weak or reflected which lowers accuracy. Instead of using satellites, indoor localization and tracking systems correlate received signal strength from wireless beacons as a function of distance. This thesis designs an efficient wireless localization and tracking system to improve the accuracy of existing methods. The proposed localization and tracking system consists of two distinct phases, an off-line and on-line phase. The off-line phase calibrates the target area and constructs a model of received signal strengths at a finite number of locations distributed about the target area. The on-line phase localizes and tracks the end user in real time by comparing the received signal strength with the signal strength of the reference points during the off-line phase. An efficient searching algorithm was developed for the on-line phase to reduce the computational complexity and increase the localization and tracking speed. A GUI was also designed to display a map of current environment as a background, and real-time location of the wireless user. The life cycle process to engineering for economic advantage is carried out in this thesis. The design has been tested with results showing accuracy in the range of approximately 1.3 meters when the grid size is 1.5 meters. The significance of this project is that a flexible model for localizing and tracking and indoor user in a wireless local area network environment is presented