Engineering location based pathfinding on Indian road networks over low end mobile phones

A non-intrusive position-sensing technology is critical to the success of location-aware services over mobile phones and PDAs. No single positioning technology can meet the localization requirements across the range of location-aware or location based services. However, for many value added services, it is possible to use locations approximations within certain tolerable thresholds. This paper, in particular, examines how GSM infrastructure can be leveraged for localization of low cost mobile phones with adequate approximations to meet the requirements of certain location aware services especially in countries like India. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by pathfinder service (prototype of a location-aware road navigation utility) for Indian cities where road network is very ill structured compared to those in American or European cities. It provides text based driving instructions to a destination when a mobile phone user sends a query via SMS. We also looked at the theoretical issues arising out of optimal shortest path computation over semi-structured road networks and propose a new algorithm for the same.