A passive and privacy-friendly area based localization for wireless indoor networks

The proliferation of geosocial networking applications has fostered an intense interest to enrich Location-based Services (LBSs). The poor scalability of Global Positioning System (GPS) within the building or dense urban area has forced such services to leverage the existing network infrastructure such as wireless networks. However, most of indoor localization systems pose a great risk to the client's privacy since the systems require the exchange of client's private information that allows the tracking of client's whereabouts. In this paper, we propose a passive and privacy-friendly area based localization system to address the privacy issue and intrinsic properties of wireless indoor channel. This system utilizes information element field in the beacon frame to piggyback the network information for the client to construct lightweight radio map. In this paper also, we evaluate the performance of the radio map in facilitating the localization system.