IEEE802.11 Access Point's Service Set Identifier (SSID) for Localization and Tracking

IEEE802.11, known as WiFi has proliferated in the last decade. It can be found in smartphones, laptops, smart TVs and surveillance cameras. This popularity has revealed many issues in health, data privacy and security. In this work, a WiFi measurement study has been conducted in Amman, the capital city of Jordan. An Android App has been written to harvest WiFi information of the transmitted frames of any surrounding Access points (APs). More than 240,000 APs information has been harvested in this work. The harvested data have been analyzed to find statistics of WiFi devices in this city. Moreover, three power distribution models have been derived from the data for three different areas, closed, open and hybrid areas. In addition, the collected data revealed that the SSID can be leveraged as a landmark for the access points (APs). To this end, SSIDtrack algorithm is proposed to track shoppers/walkers in closed areas, such as malls to find their walking route utilizing only the SSID information collected from the surrounding area. The algorithm has been tested in two different malls that consist of four different floors. The accuracy recorded for the algorithm acceded 95%.