How to scan for geographically nearby wireless access points and determine their ip and mac address

Question

How can I programmatically scan for geographically nearby wireless access points and determine their ip and mac address. Especially, how can I pull out the ip and mac address of WAPs that aren't open? How can I differentiate between wireless access points and other things, such as smartphones or computers?

Initially, I'll probably be doing this for Windows computers only, but eventually I'll want to have this scanning capability for a wide variety of OS including the MacOSX, iOS, Android...

Answer 1

MAC address of an access point, is, in case of an AP, equal to the BSSID (Basic Service Set Identifier).

Most APIs that are designed to allow for programmatic selection of available networks should have this information somewhere.

You can't determine IP address of an access point without associating to it, and attempting to use it to connect to the internet. You can totally find access points that don't have external IP at all - for instance, access points designed to allow access to internal networks of a company.

Finally, you can differentiate between access points and other things, by definition - everything that acts as an access point (ie advertises it's BSSID) is an access point.