AP geographical location encoding

[rejean]

Do any of these 802.11 standards (or PAR extension) provide for lat/long/elev coordinates encoding of where the access point is actually geographically located? Any AP Vendors currently providing for such coordinates and leading the standards?

[JimGeier]

The 802.11 standard does not define anything for access point positioning. I don't know of any PARs within 802.11 that have been submitted for this sort of thing.

[rejean]

I would welcome forward looking AP Vendor(s) joining in this thread and tell us how they foresee being the first in providing a real solution to this problem. Everything else being equal, I would select an AP Vendor solving this problem without having to purchase their own network management and centralized server schemes. I would expect other Vendors to eventually follow up and make the simple Vendor extension a de-facto standard. I was hoping that Vendor extensions eluded to was already built-in.

Being new on this forum, could someone tell me if there is any precedent where this forum was instrumental in timely pushing a PAR into the IEEE standards committee? Getting a PAR through may require the deeper pockets of an AP Vendor, business commitments as well as patience of due diligence process. A PAR may be too late for this to realistically happen now certainly on 802.11b flavor. Please let me know if this inquiry is best directed elsewhere.

[rejean]

In the absence of any AP Vendor replies, I can only think of using the various Linux Open Source kits available out there and build own AP. Problem with this is that these APs are going to be all over the map across implementations and coverage areas if integrating stuff interacting with many AP Vendors and wISPs.

In the absence of an 802.11 standards extension for this, it looks like we will have to wait for a more expensive (and centralized) solution to the problem of approximately locating an end-point from the cellular world, likely 1X :(

[John Klein]

The 802.11 Radio Resource Management Group (it doesn't have a letter yet) is chartered to address a lot of random metric reporting stuff, and should be able to cover this.

Quick! Someone draft a proposal.