Dynamic Wi-Fi RSSI normalization in unmapped locations

With the growing availability of open access WLAN networks, we assisted to the increase of marketing services that are based on the data collected from the WLAN access points. The identification of visitors of a commercial venue using WLAN data is one of the issues to create successful marketing products. One of the ways to separate visitors is to analyse the RSSI of the mobile devices signals coming to various access points at the venue. Nevertheless, the indoor signal distortion makes RSSI based methods unreliable. In this work we propose the algorithm for the WLAN based RSSI normalization in uncontrolled environments. Our approach is based on the two steps, where at first based on the collected data we detect the devices whose RSSI can be taken as a basic one. At the second step the algorithm allows based on the previously detected basic RSSI to normalize the received signal from mobile devices. We provide the analysis of a real dataset of WLAN probes collected in several real commercial venues in Italy.