Accuracy characterization of cell tower localization

Abstract

Cell tower triangulation is a popular technique for determining the location of a mobile device. However, cell tower triangulation methods require the knowledge of the actual locations of cell towers. Because the locations of cell towers are not publicly available, these methods often need to use estimated tower locations obtained through wardriving. This paper provides the first large scale study of the accuracy of two existing methods for cell tower localization using wardriving data. The results show that naively applying these methods results in very large localization errors. We analyze the causes for these errors and conclude that one can localize a cell accurately only if it falls within the area covered by the wardriving trace. We further propose a bounding technique to select the cells that fall within the area covered by the wardriving trace and identify a cell combining optimization that can further reduce the localization error by half. Author Keywords Cell localization, cell tower, received signal strength