Refined Wi-Fi fingerprinting with tag-less proximity-based positioning technique

In this paper, we introduce a novel method of using a single Wi-Fi fingerprinting technique to provide coarse position estimation and finer proximity location identification simultaneously without employing any additional tags and beacons. This method requires a special designed antenna together with a subtractive location referencing software algorithm. The method uniquely applies antenna null characteristics to replace the traditional tags-beacons approach for proximity identification. The fine proximity location identified by this method operates in a seamless manner from the user end, and it requires no additional hardware besides the smart device. This method of fine proximity location identification can be deployed in indoor or outdoor environment to work with the required infrastructure. A US and China patents of such novel technique have been filed in March 2014.