Patent ID: 8315233

Claim:
A device for estimating the position of itself in response to gathering WLAN packets, said device comprising: a radio module for receiving at least one WLAN packet addressed to at least one WLAN access point (AP), the radio module not receiving WLAN packets transmitted from the at least one WLAN AP while receiving the at least one WLAN packet addressed to the at least one WLAN AP, wherein the radio module omits transmission logic, thereby causing the device to be a receive-only device incapable of WLAN transmission; extraction logic for extracting information from said at least one WLAN packet addressed to at least one WLAN access point (AP) not presently in range of the radio module to identify the at least one WLAN AP receiving the at least one WLAN packet; and logic to cooperate with a WLAN-based positioning system to estimate the position of the device based at least in part on the information extracted from the at least one packet which identifies the at least one WLAN AP.