Wireless mesh networking

Abstract

The applications of WiFi technology have been increasingly explored, with WiFi localisation becoming a popular area of interest. However, current commercial off-the-shelf(COTS) WiFi localisation technology is unable to keep up with the latest WiFi standards and does not utilise Channel State Information(CSI) technology from new WiFi protocols that support a larger bandwidth. Additionally, they are unable to maintain their accuracy under non-line-of-sight(NLOS) conditions.

Therefore, this project aims to implement an IEEE 802.11ac-based WiFi localisation system that operates atop COTS devices that can maintain its localisation accuracy with complex multipath environments.

In this project, the WiFi localisation system is implemented and the angle estimation and location accuracy of the system are evaluated by conducting experiments in a real-world environment and analysing the consistency and error metric of the Angle of Arrival(AoA) estimates derived from the CSI readings of the system. Based on the experimental results, the calculated angle estimates were largely accurate with the average percentage of outliers per data point being 14.5% and the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of the AoA estimates being 13.2%. However, the location accuracy of the system is very low with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 21.9m.

Overall, while the system is able to provide largely consistent and accurate angle estimates, it fails to achieve location accuracy. As such, future work can improve on the localisation technique of the system.