Radio Localization with GSM

Sammanfattning: This thesis presents a feasibility study on unobtrusive localization of GSM en- abled cellphones using a Fake Base Station (FBS). An FBS is a radio transceiver that emulates the behaviour of a legitimate GSM Base Station (BS) to fool unal- tered cellphones to connect with it. This feasibility study investigates how an FBS can be utilized to estimate positions of connected cellphones in an area of interest. We present a proof of concept system that consists of a mobile FBS that measures the Time Of Arrival (TOA) and Received Signal Strength (RSS) to a cell- phone. The positions of the mobile FBS are determined with GPS. We employ calibration-free localization algorithms as we assume unknown environments and unknown hardware. Our experiments in an outdoor 180x100 m2 Line-Of- Sight (LOS) environment show that our calibration-free localization algorithms provide an average localization error less than 10 meters, which is sufficient for most applications of interest. In addition, our experiments show that RSS-based localization outperforms TOA-based localization when the average distance be- tween the FBS and cellphone is roughly 50 meters. Our experiments show that TOA-based localization outperforms RSS-based localization when the average dis- tance increases to roughly 75 meters. This research is part of the Smart Savannah project in which a wide range of different surveillance systems are developed to protect rhinos from poachers. We envision that our localization system can be used to detect and localize these poachers in an unobtrusive way. In addition, we envision that our localization sys- tem can be used in Search And Rescue (SAR) operations to estimate the positions of cellphones of missing persons.