ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Determination of location using a mobile phone

Location-aware software is becoming increasingly important in today’s networked society. Devices that run such software provide a unique opportunity to present a user with information that is relevant to where they are actually situated, enabling services such as mapping the user’s location, helping them to find a nearby restaurant, or providing a location-based news feed or weather forecast.

Traditional location-finding techniques on mobile devices have generally relied on specialised hardware, such as GPS receivers, which are not widely deployed at present. The goal of this thesis is to develop, or research and implement an existing, algorithm for determining the geographic location of a mobile phone or mobile device using the signal strength of nearby network base stations (cell towers).

Location-finding can be accomplished by combining the unique tower ID and signal strength of all towers in range of a device, with a database of co-ordinates of known station locations. The accuracy of this technique depends upon the number of towers in range of a device, as well as the inherent limitations of positioning a device inside a single mobile cell once a general idea of the device's location is known.

This project includes the development of prototype which demonstrates the aforementioned technique, along with experimental results that outline its accuracy and effectiveness. A discussion of real-world considerations such as cost, power consumption and deployment on mobile devices is also undertaken.