IEEE 802.11b wireless Ethernet is rapidly becoming the standard for in-building and short-range wireless communication. Many mobile devices such as mobile robots, laptops and PDAs already use this protocol for wireless communication. Many wireless Ethernet cards measure the signal strength of incoming packets. This paper investigates the feasibility of implementing a localization system using this sensor. Using a Bayesian localization framework, we show experiments demonstrating that off-the-shelf wireless hardware can accurately be used for location sensing and tracking with about one meter precision in a wireless-enabled office building.
The cleverness of this research was to use a state-of-the-art robotics algorithm to solve a emergent network security problem. If someone is attacking your network from a wifi access point, how do you find the machine?