Welcome
Welcome to the GeoLoc/WLAN website. GeoLoc/WLAN provides a mechanism to determine the location of a mobile device using an infrastructure of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN access points. The location is expressed in geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude) as is the case for GPS-based location determination.
An important objective of GeoLoc/WLAN is to provide an easily accessible location service. This means that it should be easy to start using the system, both from a usage and an administrative perspective. Additionally, GeoLoc/WLAN must work with an infrastructure of existing WLAN access points, without imposing extra requirements on the infrastructure.
This work is a continuation of our work on Presence, Location and Instant Messagaging (PLIM).
Mobile client
The user must run a GeoLoc client on his mobile device. Our current client target platform is a Windows XP laptop with an arbitrary 802.11 WLAN network interface. The client software takes care of looking up a user's location and takes care of distributing the location information to interested parties (other users or services). The distribution of the location information is done through the XMPP/Jabber Instant Messaging infrastructure. The GeoLoc/WLAN client software is therefore based on an existing Jabber client: Tkabber.
The snapshot above shows that the user "arjan@demo.telin.nl" is at "Campus UT, Citadel building, center" with a certain latitude and longitude. His contact "jeroen" is at "NL, Enschede, NS Station, entrance".
GeoLoc/WLAN location service
The GeoLoc/WLAN location service provides a mapping from WLAN access point identifiers to geographical coordinates. The GeoLoc/WLAN client uses this service to lookup the current location of the user. It takes the identifier (MAC address) of the access point that is currently used for communication.
Start using GeoLoc/WLAN
