In a
wireless communication network, the location of an addressable
receiver relative to the locations of a plurality of addressable sources of
electromagnetic radiation is found using probabilistic models of the
signal strength measured at the addressable
receiver. The inventive method provides
location determination on a finer spatial scale than was heretofore available. A
region of interest is calibrated via a discrete-space
radio map storing probability distributions of received
signal strength at the measurement locations. The stored probability distributions are compensated for temporal variability and biases, such as through temporal correlations of the sampled received
signal strength. A measurement of the
signal strength at the addressable
receiver from each of the plurality of addressable sources is used in conjunction with the discrete-space
radio map to identify one of the coordinates thereof that maximizes the
conditional probability P(x|s), where x is the
radio map location and s is a vector of measured signal strengths. Small spatial scale variability can be compensated for using a perturbation technique. The method further implements a continuous-space estimator to return an estimated user location that falls between discrete-space radio map locations.