Network based location tracking using MAC address of smart devices

Abstract

Most of the devices we use today from a day to day basis are considered smart. What do they mean by smart? What they mean is that they possess the ability to share and hold information amongst each other. Since the capacity of machines has evolved so has its needs and applications. Personnel location is one such capacity that has a huge array of applications. Our thesis, provides a segmented approach to locating targets namely staff in a working environment under a previously configured network i.e a system of routers repeater and extenders connected toeach otherfor our proposed system to work . We propose to use the 48 bit physical address known as MAC address of a regular smart phone which will help us connect to a WIFI network to track people's location. We are trying to implement an android based application which will employ Wi-Fi routers, repeaters and extenders to obtain the location of a target in a defined network. This location will be viewable through a map on the android app. After initial testing on a small network consisting of a router and a wifi signal extender which basically acts as another router we achieved total coverage every time i.e every time our discovery feature prompted a list of all connected devices without missing any device. We plan to use our university quarters as the test site and this will allow our app to access multiple MAC addresses as the campus is home to thousands of students and their devices.