Low Cost RTL-SDR Based Positioning Solution Based on GSM Cell Id

The localization problem has several years of existence justified through a big number of research results on algorithms and implemented solutions. It comes to us, that developing and implementing embedded low cost universal localization and positioning solution, taking advantage of existing wireless communications infrastructures, are motivating, attracting and useful tasks. In the case of GSM mobile networks, several localization methods are proposed using the GSM network parameters such as Time Of Arrival (TOA), Angle of Arrival (AOA), etc. All proposed methods require a mobile phone or GSM module to listen within specific operator network to estimate the user location. The simple one is cell identity (Cell Id) positioning, which is not requiring an additional equipment or software upgrade. In this paper, we propose a new approach to improve the accuracy of Cell Id positioning method. The localization system suggested here, is based on RTL-SDR receiver and raspberry Pi, and do not require any subscriber identity module card (SIM), the cellular information for the all network operators in the region are extracted in the Raspberry Pi board and used to estimate the user's position. The mean error of our proposed system is about 270 meters which is good if we take into consideration that we don't have the exact position of the base stations (BTS).