PHP to obtain Wireless Signal Strength from Laptops
Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2009 8:18 pm
Hi everyone, I'm new to PHP coding and I would appreciate it alot if I could get some help with something I'm working on.
First a bit of background before my question:
I'm working on an local area indoor location awareness system. It's something like GPS for the outdoors, but since GPS doesn't work well indoors (no direct line of sight from satellites) I'm planning to work with WLAN signal strength from WLAN access points to determine a user's location. How this works is roughly described as follows:
1. Let's take for example the ground floor layout of a building that has more than 3 WLAN access points. The floor layout is divided up into different smaller sections of roughly equal size and labeled A-Z respectively.
2. A database of WLAN signal strengths versus location is built by simply walking around the floor with a laptop, gathering average signal strength readings from some WLAN software, from location A to Z on the floor map.
3. After that, a user can walk around with a mobile device (presumably a laptop), and will be periodically updated of his current location by comparing the current signal strength, gathered by his laptop at any particular point in time as he is traveling through the local area, to the predetermined database of WLAN signal strengths.
The clinch is this: I plan to implement a web based application using PHP and MYSQL which any user with a browser and a WLAN enabled device without the need to run any external software. All the code needed to determine current location will be run off a central server.
My problem is this: Since I know that it is possible for a WLAN enabled laptop to detect and display signal strength on it's own (it can be natively shown on the taskbar without the need for external software), is it possible for me to obtain a numerical signal strength reading directly from my laptop? I'm assuming that it would be embedded within an operating system file that is native to the OS (or in general Windows). If yes, can PHP access and extract this data in numerical form (signal strength in dBm)?
First a bit of background before my question:
I'm working on an local area indoor location awareness system. It's something like GPS for the outdoors, but since GPS doesn't work well indoors (no direct line of sight from satellites) I'm planning to work with WLAN signal strength from WLAN access points to determine a user's location. How this works is roughly described as follows:
1. Let's take for example the ground floor layout of a building that has more than 3 WLAN access points. The floor layout is divided up into different smaller sections of roughly equal size and labeled A-Z respectively.
2. A database of WLAN signal strengths versus location is built by simply walking around the floor with a laptop, gathering average signal strength readings from some WLAN software, from location A to Z on the floor map.
3. After that, a user can walk around with a mobile device (presumably a laptop), and will be periodically updated of his current location by comparing the current signal strength, gathered by his laptop at any particular point in time as he is traveling through the local area, to the predetermined database of WLAN signal strengths.
The clinch is this: I plan to implement a web based application using PHP and MYSQL which any user with a browser and a WLAN enabled device without the need to run any external software. All the code needed to determine current location will be run off a central server.
My problem is this: Since I know that it is possible for a WLAN enabled laptop to detect and display signal strength on it's own (it can be natively shown on the taskbar without the need for external software), is it possible for me to obtain a numerical signal strength reading directly from my laptop? I'm assuming that it would be embedded within an operating system file that is native to the OS (or in general Windows). If yes, can PHP access and extract this data in numerical form (signal strength in dBm)?