Cell-ID Location Technique, Limits and Benefits: An Experimental Study

The mobile phone market lacks a satisfactory location technique that is accurate, but also economical and easy to deploy. Current technology provides high accuracy, but requires substantial technological and financial investment. In this paper we present the results of experiments intended to asses the accuracy of inexpensive Cell-ID location technique and its suitability for the provisioning of location based services. We first evaluate the accuracy of Cell-ID in urban, suburban and highway scenarios (both in U.S. and Italy), we then introduce the concepts of discovery-accuracy and discovery-noise to estimate the impact of positioning accuracy on the quality of resource discovery services. Experiments show that the accuracy of Cell-ID is not satisfactory as a general solution. In contrast we show how Cell-ID can be effectively exploited to implement more effective and efficient voice location-based services.