Temporal location of mobile WLAN stations using airborne station

摘要

A method is disclosed that relates to estimating the temporal location of mobile ground based Wi-Fi stations by monitoring a multitude of ground based access points, using an airborne Wi-Fi monitoring device. The airborne monitoring station first identifies and locates ground based access points within the area of interest. The airborne monitoring station monitors the transmission of the ground based stations and access points in the said networks, in particular the probe response management frames, recording the access point and station addresses and the time of reception. The transmissions contain an address of a corresponding ground-based access point and the address of the ground-based mobile station. The airborne monitoring station then matches all the times of the probe responses corresponding to the each station address and together with the location of the access points computes the likely temporal track for each station.