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Accuracy characterization of cell tower localization

Published: 26 September 2010 Publication History

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.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp '10: Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing
    September 2010
    366 pages
    ISBN:9781605588438
    DOI:10.1145/1864349
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 26 September 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. cell localization
    2. cell tower
    3. received signal strength

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    Ubicomp '10
    Ubicomp '10: The 2010 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
    September 26 - 29, 2010
    Copenhagen, Denmark

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    UbiComp '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 202 submissions, 19%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 764 of 2,912 submissions, 26%

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    Cited By

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    • (2025)Robust and Ubiquitous Mobility Mode Estimation Using Limited Cellular InformationIEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology10.1109/TVT.2024.345420874:1(1310-1321)Online publication date: Jan-2025
    • (2024)ModeSense: Ubiquitous and Accurate Transportation Mode Detection using Serving Cell Tower InformationProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems10.1145/3678717.3691250(184-195)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2024
    • (2024)LiTEfoot: Ultra-low-power Localization using Ambient Cellular SignalsProceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems10.1145/3666025.3699356(535-548)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Cell Tower Localisation using Graph Convolutional Networks and Positional EncodingProceedings of the 7th Joint International Conference on Data Science & Management of Data (11th ACM IKDD CODS and 29th COMAD)10.1145/3632410.3632419(375-383)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
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    • (2024)A Unified Prediction Framework for Signal Maps: Not All Measurements are Created EqualIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2022.322177323:1(70-89)Online publication date: Jan-2024
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    • (2022)Mobility of Indonesian during Early Pandemic: Insights from Mobile Positioning Data2022 14th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE)10.1109/ICITEE56407.2022.9954078(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2022
    • (2021)An Emergency Response System Based on Mobile Network User PositioningProceedings of the 2021 3rd International Conference on Big-data Service and Intelligent Computation10.1145/3502300.3502302(8-15)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2021
    • (2021)Comparative Analysis of Localization Techniques Used in LBS2021 5th International Conference on Computing Methodologies and Communication (ICCMC)10.1109/ICCMC51019.2021.9418232(300-304)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2021
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