CellSense: An Accurate Energy-Efficient GSM Positioning System

Mohamed Ibrahim, Moustafa Youssef

Abstract: Context-aware applications have been gaining huge interest in the last few years. With cell phones becoming ubiquitous computing devices, cell phone localization has become an important research problem. In this paper, we present CellSense, a prob- abilistic RSSI-based fingerprinting location determi- nation system for GSM phones. We discuss the chal- lenges of implementing a probabilistic fingerprinting localization technique in GSM networks and present the details of the CellSense systemand how it addresses these challenges. We then extend the proposed system using a hybrid technique that combines probabilistic and deterministic estimation to achieve both high ac- curacy and low computational overhead.Moreover, the accuracy of the hybrid technique is robust to changes in its parameter values. To evaluate our proposed system, we implemented CellSense on Android-based phones. Results from two different testbeds, represent- ing urban and rural environments, for three differ- ent cellular providers show that CellSense provides at least 108.57% enhancement in accuracy in rural areas and at least 89.03% in urban areas compared to the current state of the art RSSI-based GSM localization systems. In additional, the proposed hybrid technique provides more than 6 times and 5.4 times reduction in computational requirements compared to the state of the art RSSI-based GSM localization systems for the rural and urban testbeds respectively.We also evaluate the effect of changing the different system parameters on the accuracy-complexity tradeoff and how the cell towers density and fingerprint density affect the system performance.