Outdoor User Location over 802.11 Ad-hoc Network

The objective of this project is to implement outdoor user location which is build on
top of IEEE 802.11 technology. In this solution, four laptops are used where three of
the laptops will serve as the reference points and the other one will be the target. The
signal strengths from each reference laptop to the target are measured to serve as
arguments for localization algorithms, which is triangulation. In order to perform this
algorithm, the locations of the three reference laptops and their separation distance
from the target laptop are needed to be known. The locations of the reference laptops
are arbitrarily assigned but the separation distances are estimated based on the signal
strength information received by the target laptop. To find the relationship between
the separation distance and signal strength received from each reference laptop, a
series of signal strength measurements are conducted. From the collected data, the
radio propagation models are determined. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been
developed to make the process of location determination become less complicated
and more user friendly. At the end of this work, the site testing has validated that this
algorithm can be used to determine the user location in outdoor environment with
considerable accuracy.