Cellular Handover Zones as Location Estimators

Mobile communication systems produce gigabytes of mobility information day-to-day on country level, which could be exploited in various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. This paper presents the basic concept for tracking users based on handover (HO) zone detections provided by the telecommunication network. This concept is able to provide essential information for transportation investigations, moreover it can be used for localization. Since this application requires to understand the potential error sources, the contribution of this paper is to determine these errors and assess their impact on the derived position. For this investigation, we created a data acquisition system, and defined different measurement scenarios, namely, terminal vs. network side data acquisition, idle vs. active measurements, and with using various tracking software, and phone types. These results are compared. To describe the geometric and accuracy properties of the HO zones, point error and error ellipse are used. These metrics have been evaluated on our test data.