Outdoor User Location over Ad-hoc WLAN

This paper will discuss the implementation of outdoor user location in an ad hoc wireless local area network (WLAN). In this work, four laptops are used where three of the laptops will serve as the reference points and the other one will be the target. The signal strengths from each reference laptop to the target are used for triangulation. In order to perform triangulation, the locations of the three reference laptops and their separation distance from the target laptop are needed. The separation distances are estimated based on the received signal strength and the radio propagation model for each wireless network car. The radio propagation model is obtained by conducting a series of signal strength measurements for every wireless network card. At the end of this work, the site testing has verified that this algorithm can be used to determine the user location in outdoor environment with considerable accuracy.