Localization Information Retrieval Exploiting Cooperation Among Mobile Devices

Localization information retrieval is breaking new ground for mobile applications for indoor or urban areas. GPS is the positioning technology that powers the majority of the navigation devices today, it comes along with high complexity, high energy consumption and limited coverage for indoor. The main idea of this paper is to exploit cooperation among mobile devices to retrieve their geographical position without using GPS. The information used by the proposed mechanism is only based on the cell-id and the signal strength. Google has launched something similar for stand alone mobile phones with its new feature called My Location. We enhance this service using cooperation among mobile devices sharing the knowledge of cell IDs and signal strength. In this paper, after a short introduction about the proposed method, we are going to show how cooperation improves mobile devices´ localization. We propose a new architecture that aims to localize mobile phones without using GPS devices. Afterwards, we are going to describe our setup and to discuss the achieved results. The main result of this paper is that the proposed scheme with three cooperating mobile devices can reduce the estimation area of more than five times compared to cell ID approaches such as the one of Google.