Low Energy and Sufficiently Accurate Localization for Non-smartphones

Abstract

Location-aware mobile applications are steadily gaining popularity across the world. However, lack of Global Positioning System (GPS) and absence of Wi-Fi infrastructure prevent users with non-Smart phones (majority of population in developing countries) from using location-aware applications as their phones do not have access to their current location. Existing GSM based approaches such as Cell ID-based works on non-Smart phones but they require access to a comprehensive database of Cell IDs. Such a database either does not exist or is very limited in developing countries. In this paper, we propose a novel GSM-based approach of using Cell Broadcast Service (CBS) messages for getting current location on the phone. Proposed approach does not depend on a comprehensive database and can run on programmable low end phones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on data collected in New Delhi, India across two different operators and propose two space-time 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. Further, we compare accuracy of our CBS-based approach with that of Cell ID-based approach and also, present a multimodal approach that uses combination of both CBS and Cell ID (wherever available) to improve the localization accuracy.