Integrity monitoring of a wi-fi based indoor positioning system

Indoor Positioning Systems using WLANs have become very popular in recent years. These systems are spawning a new class of applications like activity recognition, surveillance, context aware computing and location based services. While Global Positioning System (GPS) is the natural choice for providing navigation in an outdoors environment, the urban environment places a significant challenge for positioning using GPS. The GPS signals can be significantly attenuated, and often completely blocked, inside buildings or in urban canyons. As the performance of GPS in indoor environments is not satisfactory, indoor positioning systems based on location fingerprinting of WLANs is being suggested as a viable alternative. The main advantage of this technique is that it can be deployed with minimal cost as no specialized hardware is necessary for setting up the system. Pre-existing WLAN infrastructure can be reused for this kind of positioning system. Several challenging problems still exist such as extensive training overheads.;In this thesis WLAN based tracking methods are studied and developed. First a testbed is developed to incorporate various approaches for comparative analysis. Then a novel integrity monitoring approach is introduced and analyzed for real time indoor location system. As another component, a commercially available RTLS called Ekahau is integrated in the system to serve as a reference to the testbed. A practical application for intrusion detection is developed as a case study.