Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Edge-empowered accurate urban vehicle localization with cellular-aware trajectories

  • Regular Paper
  • Published:
CCF Transactions on Networking

Abstract

Acquiring accurate vehicle location information in urban settings is very challenging due to the complexity of urban environments. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called UPS, to tackle urban vehicle localization problem. After extensive empirical study, we find that GSM power spectrogram collected over a distance has ideal temporal–spatial characteristics for fingerprinting. Encouraged by this observation, UPS tries to utilize the geographical trajectory and the associated GSM power spectrogram information of a moving vehicle to identify its location with reference to a map. To this end, two appealing techniques, i.e., online vehicle localization and GSM map construction, are elegantly integrated. With the former, a vehicle can accurately fix its location under complex urban environments. With the latter, a reliable metropolitan-scale GSM power map can be cost-efficiently built at edges, leveraging the strong power of crowdsourcing. By design, UPS is light-weight, requiring only a minimum hardware deployment. We implement a prototype system to validate the feasibility of the UPS design. Furthermore, we conduct extensive trace-driven simulations and results show that UPS can work stably in various urban settings and achieve an accuracy of 5.3 m with a 90% precision, overwhelming the performance of GPS by five times.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Bahl, P., Padmanabhan, V.N.: RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system. Proc. IEEE INFOCOM 2, 775–784 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  • Biswas, P., Aghajan, H., Ye, Y.: Integration of angle of arrival information for multimodal sensor network localization using semidefinite programming. In: Proceedings of 39th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers (2005)

  • Chan, Y.T., Tsui, W.Y., So, H.C., Ching, P.C.: Time-of-arrival based Localization under NLOS Conditions. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 55(1), 17–24 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chandrasekaran, G., Vu, T., Varshavsky, A., Gruteser, M., Martin, R.P., Yang, J., Chen, Y.: Tracking vehicular speed variations by warping mobile phone signal strengths. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), pp. 213–221 (2011)

  • Chen, M.Y., Sohn, T., Chmelev, D., Haehnel, D., Hightower, J., Hughes, J., LaMarca, A., Potter, F., Smith, I., Varshavsky, A.: Practical metropolitan-scale positioning for GSM phones. In: Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), pp. 225–242. Springer, Berlin (2006)

  • Elnahrawy, E., Francisco, J.A., Martin, R.P.: Bayesian localization in wireless networks using angle of arrival. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 272–273 (2005)

  • Elnahrawy, E., Austen-Francisco, J., Martin, R.P.: Adding Angle of arrival modality to basic RSS location management techniques. In: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Pervasive Computing (ISWPC) (2007)

  • Google Maps for Mobile (2018). http://www.google.com/mobile/maps/. Accessed 26 Nov 2018

  • Gwon, Y., Jain, R.: Error characteristics and calibration-free techniques for wireless LAN-based location estimation. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International workshop on Mobility Management and Wireless Access Protocols, pp. 2–9 (2004)

  • Han, H., Yu, J., Zhu, H., Chen, Y., Yang, J., Zhu, Y., Xue, G., Li, M.: SenSpeed: sensing driving conditions to estimate vehicle speed in urban environments. In: Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM (2014)

  • Ibrahim, M., Youssef, M.: Cellsense: an accurate energy-efficient GSM positioning system. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 61(1), 286–296 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kjærgaard, M.B., Bhattacharya, S., Blunck, H., Nurmi, P.: Energy-efficient Trajectory Tracking for Mobile Devices. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 307–320 (2011)

  • LaMarca, A., Chawathe, Y., Consolvo, S., Hightower, J., Smith, I., Scott, J., Sohn, T., Howard, J., Hughes, J., Potter, F., et al.: Place lab: device positioning using radio beacons in the wild. In: Pervasive Computing, pp. 116–133. Springer, Berlin (2005)

  • Li, M., Lu, Y.: Angle-of-arrival estimation for localization and communication in wireless networks. In: Proceedings of 16th European Signal Processing Conference (2008)

  • Lin, K., Kansal, A., Lymberopoulos, D., Zhao, F.: Energy-accuracy trade-off for continuous mobile device location. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 285–298 (2010)

  • Osmocombb project. http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/. Accessed 26 Nov 2018

  • Otsason, V., Varshavsky, A., LaMarca, A., De Lara, E.: Accurate GSM Indoor Localization. In: Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), pp. 141–158. Springer, Berlin (2005)

  • Paek, J., Kim, J., Govindan, R.: Energy-efficient rate-adaptive GPS-based positioning for smartphones. In: Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 299–314 (2010)

  • Paek, J., Kim, K.H., Singh, J.P., Govindan, R.: Energy-efficient positioning for smartphones using cell-ID sequence matching. In: Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 293–306 (2011)

  • Priyantha, N.B., Chakraborty, A., Balakrishnan, H.: The cricket location-support system. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, pp. 32–43 (2000)

  • Ramos, H.S., Zhang, T., Liu, J., Priyantha, N.B., Kansal, A.: Leap: a low energy assisted GPS for trajectory-based services. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 335–344 (2011)

  • Skyhook. http://www.skyhookwireless.com/. Accessed 26 Nov 2018

  • Usman, A.U., Okereke, O.U., Omizegba, E.E.: Instantaneous GSM signal strength variation with weather and environmental factors. Am. J. Eng. Res. (AJER) 4(3), 104–115 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  • Varshavsky, A., Chen, M.Y., de Lara, E., Froehlich, J., Haehnel, D., Hightower, J., LaMarca, A., Potter, F., Sohn, T., Tang, K., et al.: Are GSM phones the solution for localization? In: Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, pp. 34–42 (2005)

  • Xiao, J., Wu, K., Yi, Y., Wang, L., Ni, L.M.: Pilot: passive device-free indoor localization using channel state information. In: Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), pp. 236–245 (2013)

  • Youssef, M., Agrawala, A.: The Horus WLAN location determination system. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, pp. 205–218 (2005)

  • Youssef, M., Youssef, A., Rieger, C., Shankar, U., Agrawala, A.: Pinpoint: an Asynchronous Time-based Location Determination System. In: Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, pp. 165–176 (2006)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hongzi Zhu.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Additional information

This work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61472255, 61420106010, 61772340, 61672348, 61672151,61472068), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. EG2018028), Shanghai Rising-Star Program (Grant No.17QA1400100), DHU Distinguished Young Professor Program, and the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB1003003).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zhu, H., Wu, F., Cao, S. et al. Edge-empowered accurate urban vehicle localization with cellular-aware trajectories. CCF Trans. Netw. 2, 12–27 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42045-018-0005-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42045-018-0005-y

Keywords

Navigation