Patent ID: 8103288

Claim:
A method used for facilitating the determination of a direction of travel of a Wi-Fi enabled device within a location-based services system having a reference database of Wi-Fi access points in a target area, the reference database having estimated geographic locations for at least a subset of Wi-Fi access points in the target area, the method comprising: identifying Wi-Fi access points based on signals received by the Wi-Fi enabled device transmitted by Wi-Fi access points in range of the Wi-Fi enabled device; accessing the reference database to retrieve the corresponding geographical locations of the identified Wi-Fi access points; using the geographical locations of the identified Wi-Fi access points to estimate a sequence of positions of the Wi-Fi enabled device occurring during a window of time, the sequence having a first position; calculating a plurality of directions of travel of the Wi-Fi enabled device based on the first position and at least two of the later positions of the sequence, each direction calculation using a different later position for each individual calculation; and calculating an estimated direction of travel of the Wi-Fi enabled device based on the plurality of directions of travel.