Construction of Wi-Fi coverage heat map using the ESP8266 IoT module
Abstract
The article proposes a concept of a hardware-software solution to build the Wi-Fi heat map based on the IoT-module ESP8266. Based on the analysis of existing publications and open projects, it was found that existing tools and solutions do not allow building WiFi heat maps with sufficient accuracy and artifact level. There was created a method to build an indoor WiFi heat map coverage based on the RSSI of a wireless network. Scanning wireless channels includes a search by SSID and optionally by BSSID to avoid hopping between radio modules with the same network. The initial position is defined as the closest position to the AP and can be arbitrary. After positioning fix the room scanning is started with the fixed step square spiral . The obtained data is stored in CSV format and simultaneously transmitted to the server as JSON via MQTT. Data visualization uses Python and NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib with the edge masking griddata method. Also it is possible to build a BSSID WiFi heat map. The method and hardware-software solution were tested successfully to build a heat map. The influence on the heat map is significant from outsiders and metal objects. The highest quality result was obtained by BSSID scanning.
References
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