Low energy and sufficiently accurate localization for non-smartphones

Abstract

Location-aware applications are steadily gaining popularity across the world. However lack of GPS in low-end programmable phones (< $100) and general absence of Wi-Fi infrastructure in developing countries prevents users of low-end phones (majority of population in developing countries) from using such applications as their phones can not get location. GSM-based approaches, such as using Cell IDs, have been developed as they do not require specific hardware on phone and need no additional infrastructural support. However, Cell ID based approaches require access to a comprehensive database of Cell IDs which does not exist in developing countries and its growth is not promising either. In this paper, we present a novel GSM-based approach of using Cell Broadcast Service (CBS) messages for localization. Unlike Cell ID based approach, our approach does not depend on comprehensive database and can run on programmable low end phones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on data collected in New Delhi, India.We further propose two spacetime history based algorithms to improve upon the localization accuracy of our baseline CBS approach. The proposed algorithms provide up to 35% improvement in accuracy over the baseline method. We test our algorithms for two different cell phone operators and show that the algorithms perform consistently better. At the end, we present potential location-aware applications which can be built using CBS based localization.