Over the past few years, the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) has established itself as the leading
positioning technology. However, despite recent improvements to its receiver technology, GPS is inherently not suited to indoor environments, and since a large part of public life takes place in inner cities and enclosed spaces such as shopping malls, office buildings and railroad or subway stations, those are the very places where location-based services are most important. Indoor positioning capability is also crucial to professional applications, for example in warehouses or museums.

To address this need, Fraunhofer IIS has developed a position determination solution that uses existing wireless
networks. The positioning algorithm employed is not tied to any special transmission technology. This solution makes it possible for mobile devices in indoor and urban outdoor environments to independently determine their positions based on signal strength measurements, irrespective of which type of communication network is currently available, e.g. in the form of wireless LAN, GSM or UMTS base stations. Positions are determined with an accuracy of a few meters. Since wireless networks based on the IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi® is a registered trademark of Wi-Fi Alliance®) family of standards are particularly widespread, they are preferentially used as a basis for position determination.

Visit us at the following trade fairs:

• 28/10/2010 technology compass "positioning technologies"

• 14 - 17 February 2011 Mobile World Congress

• 01 - 03 March 2011 embedded world

• 01 - 05 March 2011 CeBIT

News

01/08/2010 Free „MobileWALK“ Download for the railway Year 2010

2010 Nuremberg celebrates 175 Jahre deutsche Eisenbahn. The program of the anniversary, the events and the locations may be downloaded at www.mobilewalk.de

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