Imagine I’m standing in a large room that has a router in the corner. Now I’m holding my iPhone and I start moving around in the room.
Is there a way I can track my movement inside that room using as static reference that router?
Imagine I take one or two steps to the left. Will such a small change in location be captured accurately under such conditions?
Do I need more than one hotspots in order to find my precise location inside the room?
Can the tracking be precise since we’re talking about movement inside a room and not out on the streets?
If you’re interested in tracking physical movement of the phone using a single wireless router as a point of reference, no, it’s not going to work. It’s defiantly not going to give you a foot or two of resolution, either.
You’d be using the wireless signal strength as a position indicator. However, you’d need two signals (two static points) minimum to give any sort of triangulation. Furthermore, signal-strength triangulation is really, really imprecise – the Wikipedia article gives a network-based tracking a resolution of around 50m. Handset based tracking uses both GPS and signal strength to give a better resolution, but it’s still not within a foot or two.
To get good position tracking, a signal is timed between the source and receiver, then triangulated. This gives quite good resolution – Wikipedia articles on “Trilateration”, “Time-Of-Flight”, and “Multilateration” would give a decent overview of that kind of system.
Long story short? No, you can’t get a physical position using a single static router as a point of reference with any degree of accuracy, or precision.