WiFi Indoor Localization and Geofencing

Many mobile devices that are used in an enterprise are considered mission critical as they are heavily relied upon, allowing a worker to do their job. Locating these devices anywhere and anytime becomes that much more important, especially if they become lost or stolen. SOTI’s technology leverages GPS on a device to track its location and can also alert if a device leaves/enters a predefined geographical fence on a map, otherwise known as geofencing. Outdoor and GPS based geofencing is widely adopted by many SOTI customers, yet indoor location and geofencing remain relatively novel. Many existing solutions rely on BLE sensors, but they require constant hands-on maintenance and offer low location accuracy. While there are multiple technological approaches to enable indoor location, SOTI is interested in researching the indoor location and geofencing capabilities through analysis of telemetry from already deployed enterprise Wi-Fi capabilities. This approach relies on existing infrastructure and does not require installation of additional sensory hardware and completely avoids the corresponding maintenance overhead.

Faculty Supervisor:

Eyal de Lara

Student:

Zichun Zhuang

Partner:

SOTI Inc

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

University of Toronto