A locating method for WLAN based location service

General wireless local area network (WLAN) based location systems use the received signal strength (RSS) as location fingerprint without any additional changes to the WLAN infrastructure. However, in real environment RSS are impacted by many factors, such as multiple path transmission (multi-path), temperature, body, etc, which harm the accuracy of location. This paper presents a method which uses both the angle of arrival (AOA) and RSS as location fingerprints based on AP scanning. Compared to other WLAN based location systems, this method takes advantages of fewer AP, less suffering from the influence of signal and higher accuracy. Furthermore, in some "clean" outdoor/indoor environments, the method can even used to locate WLAN clients without the radio map which is the basic infrastructure of general WLAN based location systems. Finally, this paper analyzes the characteristics of the AP scanning based location systems, and makes a further discussion on client-side location system using the same method.