Mapping the GSM landscape SVG Open 2005
Jan 02, 2016
Goal
• Location determination– Best effort– Automatic
• Take whatever is available:– GPS
Accurate, but requires hardware and has limited battery life
– Wifi / BluetoothCheap, but ad hoc
– Mobile networks (operator based)No extra hardware, but operator dependency and expensive
– Mobile networks (central registry)Operator independent and cheap, but limited coverage.
Cell-id database
• Central data source with cell information– Converts cell-id into location– Based on multiple measurements– All automatic GPS measurements– Free to use, but expect new cells in return– User is also contributor– Easy access via web services– Focus area: western Europe
• Alternatives:– cellspotting.com– placelab.org
July 2005 statistics
• 10389 cells of• 35 operators,• 264051 measurements in• 14 countries,• 57 provinces, and• 229 postal code regions
• And growing every day…
Possible applications
• The well-known Friend Finder– Add location information to instant messaging– Like MSN adds the now-playing-track from
MediaPlayer to the contact/buddy details• Speech recognition of street and city names
– Limit the degrees of freedom in the solution space• Voice gateway
– Call a fixed number to get information about items in your vicinity (attractions, ATMs, toilets, history,…)
• Bad connection marker– Predict bandwidth drops in advance for streaming
application
Searching for a new home
• With one click an overview of all homes in the vicinity• Without GPS but based on GSM cell location• Integrated with Funda.nl
Where are my friends and colleagues?
• Exchange context information with relations• Reason with context information
• Frequently visited places• Predict destination• Business travelling• In a meeting• In or out the office
Demo!Demo!
If you want to use the cell-id database
An easy 4-step process:
• Get an impression of what is there:http://www.lab.telin.nl/~koolwaaij/showcase/gsmcells
• Sign a license and get the credentials from:[email protected]
• Access the webservice to convert cell-id into lat-long:http://client140.lab.telin.nl:8080/wasp/services/CellStoreService?wsdl
• Generate the client stubs and use them in your application, use standard HTTP authentication
Code sample in C#
• Create a new project• Add a web reference to the cell store service• Call the web service:
CellStoreService myService = new CellStoreService(); myService.Url = "http://server.nl/service";myService.listCells(204,8,false);
• Returns a CellData[] with all cells for operator 8 (KPN) in country 204 (The Netherlands).
It is as easy as that!
Thank you!
http://www.telin.nl
Johan Koolwaaij
August 2005