Cross-Provider Cooperation for Improved Network-Based Localization

This paper considers the problem of network-based mobile-phone positioning when multiple providers are available. This paper proposes two cross-provider localization algorithms via a cooperative approach, which are called linear regression (LR) and locally cooperative embedding (LCE), to efficiently exploit the complementary information from each network provider. The former chooses the provider weights that minimize the mean-square positioning errors. The latter dynamically embeds the cooperation and iteratively refines the positioning process according to each provider's local accuracy surrounding the user. This paper applies the proposed cross-provider positioning algorithms to actual Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks, using a dual-subscriber-identity-module (SIM) mobile phone connecting to multiple providers simultaneously. On-site experiments clearly demonstrated that the proposed cross-provider approaches provide better positioning accuracy than any individual provider, where LCE achieves the best performance.