A survey of client geolocation using Wi-Fi positioning services

Abstract

Wi-Fi positioning systems (WPS) utilize a location's set of Wi-Fi access point (AP) media access control (MAC) addresses and received signal strength pairs as input to an algorithm that resolves location referencing a database of spatially labeled AP data. WPS are particularly useful in urban canyons where Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite views are often blocked. WPS can provide a quicker result than GPS with more accuracy than Internet Protocol (IP) or cellular geolocation. In this work, we present the design and construction of a corpus of Wi-Fi AP MAC address sets derived from the Wireless Geographic Logging Engine (WiGLE) database and Census Bureau data. We use our corpus of MAC address queries as input to controlled WPS requests. For the resulting WPS responses, we compare the overlap, centroid distance, and provide insight into the services' accuracy and inter-agreement.