Use of GIS in Radio Frequency and Positioning Applications

GIS are geoprocessing programs that are commonly used to store and perform calculations on terrain data, maps, and other geospatial data. GIS offers the latest terrain and building data as well as tools to process this data. This thesis considers three applications of GIS data and software: a Large Scale Radio Frequency (RF) Model, a Medium Scale RF Model, and Indoor Positioning. The Large Scale RF Model estimates RF propagation using the latest terrain data supplied in GIS for frequencies ranging from 500 MHz to 5 GHz. The Medium Scale RF Model incorporates GIS building data to model WiFi systems at 2.4 GHz for a range of up to 300m. Both Models can be used by city planners and government offcials, who commonly use GIS for other geospatial and geostatistical information, to plan wireless broadband systems using GIS. An Indoor Positioning Experiment is also conducted to see if apriori knowledge of a building size, location, shape, and number of floors can aid in the RF geolocation of a target indoors. The experiment shows that correction of a target to within a building's boundaries reduces the location error of the target, and the vertical error is reduced by nearly half.