Patent ID: 7502620

Claim:
In a location-based services system having a reference database of Wi-Fi access points in a target area, each access point in the target area identified by a corresponding fixed size MAC address and each Wi-Fi access point positioned at a corresponding geographical location, a method of encoding MAC addresses and geographical locations of the access points to facilitate storage or transmission of the database contents to Wi-Fi enabled devices using the system, the method comprising the acts of: (a) storing as an entry of the database a reset address entry, said reset address entry including a fixed-size MAC address and marker information to indicate that the entry has a complete MAC address for a corresponding access point; (b) for each access point in at least a subset of access points in the target area, encoding a mathematical difference between (i) the MAC address of a corresponding access point and (ii) one of the other MAC addresses represented in the database, and storing said encoding, as delta information, in a corresponding delta address entry of the database, said delta address entry further including marker information to indicate that the entry has delta information from which a complete MAC address for a corresponding access point can be reconstituted; and (c) for each entry in the database, including information to represent the geographical location of the corresponding access point.