Metropolitan-Scale Location Estimation Using FM Radio with Analysis of Measurements

This study presents a metropolitan-scale location system using FM radio. FM is a wider-covered and longer-lived infrastructure and originally designed to listen for broadcasting information. Although FM towers have existed for a long time and recent mobile devices have already contained a low-cost FM receiving function, using FM signal strength for positioning has not been well explored. Our system is deployed by collecting realistic FM radio in the campus of National Taiwan University. The experimental results show that the proposed FM location system not only satisfies the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirement but also provides a comparable performance to GSM based solution. Moreover, an additional contribution of this work is to examine the correlation between different wireless technologies and positioning accuracy. We completely analyze the radio measurements of FM and GSM from three perspectives, including temporal variation, spatial separation and spectrum utilization.