Collaborative Cellular-Based Location System

A large number of techniques for location estimation relying on the existing wireless radio infrastructures have been proposed in the last few years. Solutions relying on the use of cellular networks can be used almost everywhere, but tend to have low precision. In this paper, we propose the use of information sharing among nearby mobile phones for improving accuracy of cellular-based location. Our information sharing solution was developed in the context of UCLS, a modular location system. This mechanism allows a mobile phone to use additional signal-strength information obtained from nearby devices, that can be connected to different cells of the same or of a different operator. Results show that this additional information helps improving results, with accuracy over 94.8% when using only 2 mobile phones connected to different cell towers when locating the user at the room-level.