Cell-ID location technique, limits and benets: an experimental study.

Emiliano Trevisani Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universit` di Roma La Sapienza a via Salaria 113, 00198 Rome, Italy trevisani@dis.uniroma1.it Abstract
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 nancial 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 rst 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 efcient voice location-based services.

Andrea Vitaletti Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica Universit` di Roma La Sapienza a via Salaria 113, 00198 Rome, Italy vitale@dis.uniroma1.it
and nancial investment. For example, A SSISTED GPS requires a server and a GPS receiver to be installed at each cell site, at a cost of about US $2.000 per site. A GPS receiver must also be built into each new handset. T IME OF ARRIVAL does not require subscribers to buy new handsets, however location measurement units (LMUs), costing as much as US $10.000, must be installed at each base station. E112, the European equivalent of the American E911, does not impose any accuracy or technology mandate on carriers; they only need to provide those location capabilities which are compatible with their current networks. For this reason, most of E.U. wireless carriers are rst expected to use the low cost Cell-ID positioning to fulll E112 requirements. This very basic form of location technology uses latitude and longitude of the antenna handling the communication as an approximation of the actual phone position. CellID positioning is simple and economic and it does not require any upgrade of handsets or network equipments, but since the handset can be anywhere within a cell, accuracy depends on cell size. This justies a further investigation on the performance of Cell-ID positioning in order to better understand how this low cost technology can be fruitfully exploited. Many papers [7, 1, 3, 8, 10] state that Cell-IDs accuracy may range from some meters to some kilometers. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there are only few and very preliminary studies, see for example [7, 6], assessing the effectiveness of Cell-ID by experiments. The rst contribution of this paper is to provide an experimental assessment of the quality of Cell-ID location technique. Cell-ID performance. In this paper we present the results of some experiments on Cell-IDs performance run both in U.S. (NY area) and in Italy (Rome area) and in three distinct contexts: urban, suburban and highway. Some comments are in order. Studying Cell-IDs performance by simulation requires operators to provide information on network planning. This data is not made public by operators. Furthermore, as we will see in greater detail in the following, Cell-IDs performance is strongly inuenced by unpre-

Introduction
The ability to locate a mobile device is crucial for providing geographically dependent information, and it has been indicated in some studies [4, 10] as a key factor for the development of new wireless services. Location based services include eet management, vehicle tracking, tracking for theft recovery, telemetry, emergency services, location identication, navigation, location based information services and location based advertising. The current push for location based services in North America started in 1996, as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved the Enhanced 911 (E911) mandate. This rule, revised in 1999, requires wireless carriers to be able to locate, within 50 to 100 meters, any wireless phone calling the 911, the U.S. nation-wide emergency service number. U.S. mobile operators, motivated by E911 requirements, are experimenting with new and effective location techniques. Most of these require substantial technological

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dictable factors such as communication load, noise, multipath propagation etc. These factors make the denition of a suitable simulation environment hard. We remark that our experiments do not try to be complete, our goal rather is to provide a framework in which Cell-IDs performance can be objectively assessed. In order to better evaluate the accuracy of Cell-ID location technique, we compare the actual location of a handset provided by a GPS (GPS), with its Cell-ID approximate location (CID). We rst evaluate the average distance E(d) between CID and GPS. Our experiments in the urban context show that E(d) is about 800 meters in U.S. and 500 meters in Italy. Furthermore, Cell-ID location assumes that the phone is connected to the closest antenna, but this assumption is true in only 57% of our experiments. This strongly limits the performance of Cell-ID. A natural question arises: What kind of location based services can we deploy, having E(d) in the order of 500 meters? If we want to know the best path from our current location to a given destination, an error of 500 meters is probably too large. Nevertheless, there is a set of significant services, the so called Resource Discovery Services (RDS), for which Cell-IDs accuracy might be sufcient. The goal of RDS is to locate a set of resources close enough to the customers current location, not necessarily the closest ones. These services answer questions like: Which Chinese restaurants are in my vicinity?. In order to understand how Cell-ID impacts the quality of RDS , we introduce the concept of discovery-accuracy. Discovery-accuracy counts the fraction of resources near GPS, that can also be located using CID. Experiments show that discovery-accuracy is often too small for the provisioning of suitable resource discovery services. Voice Location-Based Services. Our measurements seem to strongly limit the use of Cell-ID to provide even very basic location-based services. The second main contribution of this paper is to show how Cell-ID can be effectively exploited in the setting of Voice Location-Based Services. In this context, users are expected to provide their locations by voice (e.g. Im in via Margutta 18) to an Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR). The ASR is in charge of recognizing the users vocal input. The effectiveness and efciency of the ASR mainly depend on the size of the grammar used to recognize the users vocal input. A grammar consisting of all addresses in a city is too large to guarantee good performances. For this reason, we use Cell-ID to limit the grammar size to only the addresses in the vicinity of the antenna handling the users communication. In our experiments, the system using Cell-ID to limit the grammar size shows signicantly better performance. Structure of the paper. In section 1 we give an overview of the most signicant location technologies and we briey

evaluate the effort to deploy such technologies. Cell-ID results in the least accurate technology; nevertheless, it does not require any upgrade of handsets or networks and it is immediately deployable. In section 2 we evaluate Cell-ID performance and we introduce the notion of average distance, proximity, discovery-accuracy and discovery-noise. Furthermore, we present the results of the experiments performed in urban, suburban and highway contexts both in U.S. and in Italy. These results seem to strongly limit the usefulness of Cell-ID for many location-based services. Nevertheless, in section 3 we show a Voice Location-Based Service which actually takes advantage from the knowledge of the approximate user position.

1. Location Techniques
For the sake of exposition, we can abstract the cellular network as shown in Figure 1.

C2 C3 MS LAI

Figure 1. A simplied view of the Cellular Network. The Mobile Station (MS) is within the cell C3.

A Base Transceiver Station (BTS) covers a set of cells, each of them identied by a unique Cell-ID (i.e. C1, C2 and C3 in the gure). A Mobile Station (MS), continuously selects a cell, and exchanges data and signalling trafc with the corresponding BTS. Cells are grouped into clusters, each of them identied by a Location Area Identier (LAI). In order to avoid excessive signalling trafc, as long as the MS is in idle mode, the network knows only the LAI. The network becomes aware of the Cell-ID only when the MS switch into dedicated mode, namely when the channel is used to actually establish a call. In contrast, the MS always knows the Cell-ID of the cell it is in. In the following we give a brief description of the main location techniques for cellular networks, see [3] for further details.

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BTS

C1

message is received by the MS that compares the relative times of arrival to estimate its distance from each visible BTS. The MS calculates the nal position via trilateration. E-OTD requires the MSs to be upgraded to properly manage the ad-hoc messages. Furthermore, E-OTD requires the installation of some synchronized clocks providing the reference time to correctly calculate the nal position of the MS. Suppliers for E-OTD solutions include CPS, Ericsson and BT Cellnet. T IME O F A RRIVAL (TOA). This method estimates the distance of an MS with respect to a set of Location Measurement Units (LMUs), evaluating the differences between the arrival times of the access bursts sent by the mobile device. The network calculates the nal position via trilateration. This technology requires the installation of an LMU at each BTS and it is therefore expensive. Rolling out TOA for an entire network is estimated to cost as much as ten times the price of an E-OTD system. C ELL -ID. This location technique does not require any network and terminal upgrade and it is therefore economic and can be immediately deployed. Each BTS broadcasts both the LAI and the Cell-ID to its cells. An MS is always receiving these broadcast messages; thus, it always knows its Cell-ID. Knowing its Cell-ID, an MS can approximate its actual location using the geographical coordinates of the corresponding BTS. Hence, the MS is assumed to be located at the BTS coordinates independently of its actual position within the cell. Cell-IDs accuracy can be improved using Timing Advance (TA). In TDMA, as a result of inherent propagation delay, slot timing varies as a function of the distance between BTS and MS. TA is calculated by the BTS and sent to the mobile handset to re-synchronize time slots in function of the propagation delay. Knowing the TA, the MS can estimate the distance from the current BTS as a function of the delay. In practice, TA is a discrete parameter; each unit represents about 500 meters. Observe that TA is available only in dedicated mode, while Cell-ID is always known. Recent work shows that it is possible to improve accuracy of Cell-ID using fading phenomena and/or predictive techniques. In [7] the authors try to compensate the fading effects by carrying out multiple distance estimations between MS and different BTSs. This method does not increase the complexity of the networks, but improvements in accuracy (up to 50%) are strictly correlated to the quality of the propagation model. In [9] the authors adopt predictive models based on channel impulse response and location sensitive parameters estimations. This method has a strong impact on the network and introduces remarkable processing overhead. In [11] the authors present a simple algorithm for computing the location of a device based on signal strengths from FM radio stations.

Figure 2. Accuracy vs. Coverage of several location techniques.

In Figure 2 we show a qualitative comparison of location techniques accuracy and coverage. G LOBAL P OSITIONING S YSTEM (GPS). GPS consists of a constellation of 24 satellites. Because these satellites are continuously broadcasting their own position and direction, the GPS receiver can calculate its position with an excellent approximation via trilateration. GPS technology for mobile phones is being currently developed by SnapTrack and SiRF and it is already used in Benefon dual mode GSM/GPS handsets. Despite good accuracy, GPS has some disadvantages: accuracy depends on the number of visible satellites; set-up time can be quite long, many minutes in the worst case; power consumption can be high. Moreover, GPS does not work indoor or when satellites are in shadow.

A SSISTED -GPS (A-GPS). To overcome some of the limits of GPS, A-GPS requires Base Transceiver Stations (BTSs) to be equipped with GPS receivers. In this way BTSs can provide information about visible satellites, allowing the GPS installed on the MS to speed up its tracking phase. Therefore, MSs no longer have to look for satellite connections, which dramatically reduces power consumption. A-GPS can provide better results than GPS in terms of accuracy because of differential GPS. This technique exploits the knowledge of both the actual BTS position and its GPS approximation to estimate GPS error. As a result, this error can be corrected applying a suitable correction factor. Nevertheless, A-GPS does not work indoor and requires both the upgrade of MSs and BTSs. E NHANCED O BSERVED T IME D IFFERENCE (E-OTD). Each BTS broadcasts an ad-hoc message to its cells. This

Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004) 1550-6193/04 $20.00 2004 IEEE

Cell type Large macrocell Small macrocell Microcell Picocell Nanocell

Cell Dimension (km) 3-30 1-3 0.1-1 0.01-0.1 0.01-0.001

Table 1. Cell Types. The size range from some meters to some kilometers.

2. Cell-IDs performance
Cell-ID suffers from an inherent lack of accuracy; the size of a cell may range from some meters to some kilometers (see Table 1). Moreover, the size of a cell is uncertain, depending, among other things, on interferences, local expected trafc and sensitivity of the MSs antenna. In the following we present the results of some experiments performed to better evaluate the accuracy of Cell-ID compared with respect to GPS accuracy. At the best of our knowledge, this is one of the rst public experimental study in the area.

Figure 3. A pictorial view of the experiments in Manhattan.

2.1. Scenarios
The experiments described in the following, were possible thanks to the cooperation of cellular telephone companies AT&T in US and WIND in Italy which provided us the GSM and CDPD handsets and the BTS locations. The experiments have been performed both in New York (U.S.) area and Rome (Italy) area and in three distinct contexts: URBAN (high density of base stations, small/medium cell size), SUBURBAN (average density of base stations, lower than in the urban context, medium/big cell size) and HIGHWAY (low density of base stations, big cell size). Overall we collected more than 6000 samples. We equipped a mobile device with both a GPS and a wireless modem, CDPD in U.S. and GSM in Italy1 . We recorded modem and GPS information into a log le every two seconds. The main elds of the log le are a time stamp, Cell-ID, latitude and longitude, GPS accuracy (estimated horizontal/vertical position error in meters), speed, CDPD/GSM status, Signal Noise Ratio (SNR) and Block Error Rate. GPS can accurately estimate the position of an MS; typically, it approximates user location within a few meters. In the following we assume that the GPS position is the actual location of the mobile user. It may happen that some records in the log le miss ei1 GSM is a widely used standard in Europe. The U.S. market exploits several cellular technologies. We considered only CDPD because were the only available network planning data.

ther modems information or GPSs information or both of them. This is mainly due to insufcient or missing channel availability for cellular connections and to shadow effects for GPS. We denote by Samples the overall number of records in the log le and by Useful the percentage of records for which we have both GPS and modem information. Finally, we denote by GP S the percentage of records for which we do not have GPS information and by M OD the percentage of records for which we do not have modem information (see Table 2 and 3). In Figure 3 we give a pictorial representation of the information collected while driving about Manhattan (NY). Each point in the path is a GPS location; different colors correspond to different Cell-IDs. Isolated points in the map, namely points that are not part of the main path, are BTSs locations. Sometimes the path is not continuous, this is due to lack of the GPS connection.

2.2. Average distance

A rst estimation of the quality of Cell-ID is the average distance (E(d)) between the GPS position and the estimated Cell-ID position, calculated over all samples in the log le. A small value for E(d), with a relatively small variance , provides evidence that Cell-ID can well approximate the MS actual location. The results of the experiments are shown in Table 2 and 3. The rows Min and Max are respectively the minimum and maximum distance of the MS from the corresponding BTS, namely the minimum and maximum distance of the MS as measured by its on board GPS from its corresponding Cell-ID position.

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Samples Useful E(d) Min. Max. GP S M OD

URBAN 2075 96% 0.48Km 0.36Km 0.03Km 2.68Km 1% 3%

SUBURBAN 2114 94% 0.75Km 0.82Km 0.05Km 11.34Km 3% 3%

HIGHWAY 636 97% 1.0Km 0.64Km 0.19Km 3.67Km 0% 3%

Table 2. The experimental results in Italy: in the urban context the average distance is about 500m.

moving from an URBAN to a SUBURBAN context again increasing considerably in the HIGHWAY context. The reason is that, in suburbia, CDPD coverage is concentrated in high populated areas where demand for connectivity is more likely . This may result in relatively small spots of connectivity providing good results in terms of average distance. Finally, observe the very high value of the maximum distance in the suburban context for the Italian data (more than 11 Km). In this particular case the MS was at the boundary of two location areas and the cell selection algorithm opted to delay the switch from the farther BTS to a closest one in order to limit the exchange of signalling trafc.

2.3. Proximity
Samples Useful E(d) Min. Max. GP S M OD URBAN 2237 82% 0.79Km 0.39Km 0.02Km 1.85Km 6% 12% SUBURBAN 665 57% 0.49Km 0.38Km 0.11Km 1.70Km 0% 43% HIGHWAY 1188 44% 2.91Km 2.00Km 0.95Km 8.35Km 6% 50%

Table 3. The experimental results in U.S.: in the urban context the average distance is about 800m.

In general, the percentage of samples missing valid GPS information is higher in U.S. This is likely due to environmental peculiarities: NYs skyscrapers (canyon effect) and NJs forests often shadow satellites. Observe that in U.S. suburban context, buildings are relatively at, allowing good satellite reception. M OD is dramatically higher in U.S. data. This can be explained by the poor performance of CDPD when compared to GSM. CDPD is a packet data protocol transmitting short burst of data across idle frequency on the AMPS network. Hence CDPD is allowed to transmit only when frequencies are not used by voice trafc. Least but not last, E.U. GSM networks provide generally better coverage. Furthermore in Italy, M OD is the same in all the contexts, while in U.S., it remarkably increases from urban to highway context, i.e. urban area is better covered than suburbia. All this leads to a percentage of useful samples considerably higher in the Italian experiments. In urban context, the average distance is about 800 meters for U.S. data and decreases to 480 meters for Italian data, while standard deviation is comparable, less than 400 meters. In the Italian case, as we expected, average distance increases from URBAN to SUBURBAN and then to HIGHWAY scenarios. Interestingly, this is not true for the experiments conducted in the U.S., where average distance decreases when

Cell-ID works under the implicit assumption that the MS is always connected to the closest BTS. This is often a simplication. Indeed, it may happen that the MS is connected to a farther BTS, mainly because of Multipath propagation, differences in the transmission power of BTSs, and behavior of the cell selection algorithm. Multipath propagation occurs when signals take different paths when propagating from the BTS to the MS. As a result, some of the signals will encounter delay and travel longer paths to the receiver, producing an attenuation/amplication of the received signal. This effect misleads the MS inducing it to connect to a farther BTS with a momentary better SNR. Furthermore each BTS has its own transmission power dened at cell planning. Thus it may happen that a further antenna, with higher transmission power, is selected by the cell selection algorithm because it provides a better SNR for the received signal. Finally, the cell selection algorithm may choose to maintain a connection to a farther BTS in order to limit signalling trafc. We have processed the Italian samples to verify how often the MS really selects the cell covered by the closest BTS. The results are shown in Table 4; Close is the percentage of samples not connected to the closest BTS. On 1775 samples in the urban context, Close is 43%. The difference between the distance of the MS to closest BTS and the distance of the MS from the selected BTS is in average 90 meters with a standard deviation of about 190 meters. This distance increases to about 200 meters in suburban and highway contexts, while the standard deviation is always remarkably high, more than 190 meters. The MS is more likely connected to the closest BTS in highway and suburban contexts rather than in urban context. This behavior can be explained by the higher density of BTSs in urban context that strongly inuences the above described phenomena. Hence, we have to remark that Cell-ID very often does not select the closest BTS. Obviously, this strongly inu-

Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004) 1550-6193/04 $20.00 2004 IEEE

Samples Close E(d)

URBAN 1775 43% 0.09Km 0.19Km

SUBURBAN 1820 32% 0.2Km 0.67Km

HIGHWAY 295 39% 0.2Km 0.39Km

R3 GPS d R2 R1 CID d R4

Table 4. The experimental results in Italy: in the urban context the MS is not connected to the closest BTS in 43% of the samples.

ences the results for the average distance.

2.4. Discovery-Accuracy and Discovery-Noise

The above results show that, the average distance, in urban context, is about 500 meters in Italy and about 800 meters in U.S. A natural question arises: What kind of locationbased services can we deploy having an average distance of about 500-800 meters? These gures may suggest that even basic location-based services are not viable using Cell-ID. Nevertheless, in our opinion there is a set of signicant services, the so called resource discovery services, for which Cell-IDs accuracy might be sufcient. Resource discovery services answer questions like: Which Chinese restaurants are in my vicinity? . In this case we are not really interested in the closest restaurant, but in restaurants close enough. In order to investigate how Cell-IDs accuracy affects the deployment of resource discovery services, we introduce the notion of discovery-accuracy. Lets denote by GPS and CID respectively the MS position as measured by its on board GPS and its approximate position estimated by CellID. d Given a resource R, a position P and a distance d, RP is the set of resources within d Km from P (e.g. the set of Chinese restaurants in the surroundings of P). Discovery accuracy A is a function of R, d, GPS and CID, dened as follow: A=
d d |RCID RGPS | d |RGPS |

Figure 4. In this example A = 1 is very good, but half of the resources near CID are not near GPS (N = 0.5).

This expression returns the fraction of resources near the actual position of a user, that can also be located using his approximate position. Accuracy is not enough. We also require that resources in the surrounding of CID are almost the same as those close to GPS. Indeed, it may happen to have high discovery accuracy and, at the same time, the d d set Rd = RCID RGPS might have high cardinality. Re sources in Rd can be considered as noise, because they are close to the approximate position, but at the same time, they are not close enough to the actual position of the user. For this reason we introduce the notion of discovery-noise dened as follow: N =1
d d |RCID RGPS | d |RCID |

To clarify the concepts of accuracy and noise, lets consider the example in Figure 4. In this gure, A = 1 is very good, but R is made of 2 elements (R3 and R4 ) and thus N = 0.5. Summarizing, the quality of the approximate position CID in terms of resource discovery, increases if A tends to one and at the same time N tends to zero. In the following we present some experiments on discoveryaccuracy and discovery-noise. These experiments are not exhaustive they are rather intended to show how the concepts of accuracy and noise can be easily applied in practice. In Figure 5 we have collected samples driving on Avenue of the Americas (Manhattan, NY), between Bleecker St. and 24 St. The CDPD modem was always connected to the same cell tower. Thus Cell-ID is the same for all the samples. We limit our attention to samples A,B,C and D. Points A and D are located at the end points of the path. In particular point D is the farthest sample, about 1.3 Km away from the BTS, thus it possibly represents an upper bound to A. Point B is the closest sample, about 0.07 Km. Point C is about 0.77Km away from the BTS; because this distance is very close to the average U.S. urban distance (see Figure 3), point C can be considered as the average sample. d In order to determine the set of resources RP , we query 2 Yahoo yellow pages , providing as input the resource (e.g. Starbucks) and latitude and longitude of the sample. Yahoo replies with the resources in the surroundings of the sample, by which, after a simple post-processing, we can easily calculate A and N . In Table 5 we show the results for discovery-accuracy and discovery-noise for different values of the distance d. Re2 http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypResults.py?stx=starbucks&city= New+York&state=NY&country=us&slt=40.733&sln=-73.999

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4.82 Km A 0.80 1.00 0.80 0.65 A 0.92 1.00 0.92 0.92 N 0.20 0.00 0.20 0.35 N 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.08

A B C D

A B C D

CID:28857 R:Starbucks 3.22 Km 1.6 Km 1 mile A N A N 0.80 0.20 0.85 0.08 1.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 0.90 0.10 0.92 0.40 0.65 0.35 0.54 0.65 R:Barnes&Noble A N A N 0.80 0.00 1.00 0.17 1.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 1.00 0.09 1.00 0.17 1.00 0.09 1.00 0.17

0.8 Km A 0.63 1.00 0.50 0.13 A 0.25 1.00 0.75 0.75 N 0.17 0.00 0.43 0.89 N 0.00 0.00 0.25 0.25

Table 5. The results for Accuracy and Noise of the experiments depicted in Figure 5. We considered two services Starbucks and Barnes & Noble. The distance d ranges from 0.8Km to 4.82Km.

Figure 5. An experiment in NY. Points A,B,C and D are considered to evaluate Accuracy and Noise.

Italian experiments have been performed on a more significant set of 68 samples. In order to determine the set of resources around a given position, we query the Italian Yellow Pages3 online. This service, differently from Yahoo, limits the search for specic services to those that are within 1Km from the given position.

0.8 0.7

sults show that empirically A = 1 N , with A larger than 0.63 in most cases. This can be considered a positive result, recalling that the quality of Cell-ID increases if A tends to one and at the same time N tends to zero. In general, as expected, A increases with the distance d. This is not true for point C and it can be explained with the different distribution of Starbucks stores around the BTS and around point C. Service accuracy is larger than 0.5 independently of the distance d, except for the farthest point D. In particular point C, the average sample, has A = 0.5 even with the smallest distance, but in this case N = 0.43 is relatively high. Point B, being so close to the BTS, shows the highest discovery accuracy. Therefore, restricting to the experiment above, in most cases, half of Starbucks stores that are in the surroundings of the MSs actual position, are also in the surrounding of its approximate Cell-ID position. Thus, Cell-ID location might be considered a valid substitute of the actual position. This conclusion, is even more evident looking at the results of a similar experiment, in which we replaced the resource Starbucks with Barnes & Noble (see Table 5). Indeed, comparing the gures concerning A and N , accuracy for Barnes & Noble is always greater than for Starbucks and noise is always lower for Barnes & Noble.

0.6 Accuracy 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 d 0.8 1 Bank Restaurant First Aid Pharmacy

Figure 6. Italian experiments on Accuracy. The distance range from 0.2Km to 1Km. We considered four resources: banks, restaurants, rst aids and pharmacies.

We restrict our attention to four resources: banks, restaurants, rst aids and pharmacies. Restaurants and banks represent spread resources, pharmacies are average spread resources while rst aids are scarcely spread resources.
3 http://paginegialle.virgilio.it/pg/geograca.html

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1 0.9 0.8 0.7 Noise 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 d 0.8 1 Bank Restaurant First Aid Pharmacy

d Bank Restaurant First Aid Pharmacy

1 Km 32% 28% 12% 29%

0.8 Km 31% 32% 18% 26%

0.5 Km 31% 35% 7% 36%

0.2 Km 41% 31% 1% 43%

Table 6. In about 30% of the experiments in Italy, Cell-ID is not able to provide any of the resources in the vicinity of the MS actual position.

Figure 7. Italian experiments on Noise. Noise is always higher than Accuracy except for d = 1Km.

Results are shown in Figures 6 and 7. We stress that in this case, the value of A and N are the average over all 68 samples. Accuracy is always smaller than noise when d 0.8Km and for d > 0.8Km a new rough, empirical rule A N 0.5 emerges. Why this behavior which is so different from the U.S. experiments? The calculation of A depends on the distance d, the resource R and E(d). If E(d) = 0 then A is always one and N is zero. As E(d) increases, d becomes more and more important to obtain a good discovery accuracy. Nevertheless, increasing d sufciently we can always have A as close to one as we want for any given value of E(d); thus, the accuracy of the location technique becomes less relevant. Now observe that in U.S. E(d) = 0.79Km and d ranges from 0.8Km to 4.82Km (see Table 5), while in Italy E(d) = 0.48Km, but d ranges from only 0.2Km to 1Km. All consideration above seem to limit the applicability of Cell-ID and suggest that increasing the distance d to more than 1Km one is likely to obtain results similar to the U.S. ones. We nally consider the fault frequency, namely the perd centage of samples for which A = 0 but the set RGPS is not empty. The fault frequency is an estimation of the robustness of Cell-ID. Indeed, high fault frequency shows that in most cases Cell-ID is not able to nd out even one of the resources found using GPS positioning. Experimental results are shown in Table 6. Intuitively, faults frequency should decrease with distance. This is generally true for banks, restaurants and pharmacies. Nevertheless, in some cases, faults frequency increases with distance. As distance increases, d the number of samples with not empty RGPS may increase, leaving the number of samples with A = 0 unchanged. See Figure 8 for an example. Scarcely spread resources show a relatively low fault frequency that increases with distance. The example in Figure

8, intuitively shows us that it is more likely that fault frequency increases with distance when resources are scarcely spread. Indeed, xed d, if we consider spread resources it is d d more likely that RCID RGPS is not empty. In any case, fault frequency is always rather high, about 30%. We stress again that our experiments have not the ambition of being complete, our main goal is rather to provide a framework in which Cell-IDs performance can be suitably and objectively assessed.

Figure 8. Fault frequency may increase with distance: two samples, two resources (R1 and R2 ). When d = d1 fault frequency is 50% and increases to 100% when d = d2 > d1 .

3. Improving Location-Based Voice Services by Cell-ID

The above results show that the accuracy of Cell-ID is often too poor to provide location-based services. Nevertheless in this section we present a new Voice-XML (VXML, [12]) solution which takes a great advantage from the knowledge of the approximate user location estimated by Cell-ID. VXML allows a user to interact with the Internet through a voice-recognition/synthesis technology. Instead of a traditional browser that relies on a combination

Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004) 1550-6193/04 $20.00 2004 IEEE

of HTML, keyboard and mouse, VXML relies on a voice browser and the telephone. Using VXML, the user interacts with a voice browser by listening to audio output that is either pre-recorded or computer-synthesized and submitting audio input using his/her voice or through a keypad, such as a telephone. The audio input recognition process is performed by the ASR (Automatic Speech Recognizer). The ASR uses a grammar to recognize words or sentences from the users spoken speech; it accepts speech from the user and produces text. The effectiveness and efciency of the recognition process strongly depend on the grammar size. Consider the following scenario: a user in Rome calls a VXML server and says: Im in via Margutta 45, where is the closest restaurant?. First of all we should know if the user is in Rome. Even if we already knew that he/she is in Rome, the number of addresses, and consequently the recognition grammar size, would possibly consist of thousand of entries. We need a method to reduce the grammar size in order to improve the performance of the recognition process. CellID is a suitable method. Indeed, by knowing Cell-ID we can limit the grammar size to only to the addresses in the corresponding cell. Thus, using cell-ID we can reduce the search domain from all Roman addresses to all the ones in a circle having center in the BTS and an average radius of 500m.

Im in via Margutta 45 3

Cellular Network Cell-ID 1 MS BTS

VXMLBrowser ASR TTS

The grammar of all the addresses

Reduction

The grammars size is reduced by Cell-ID

Figure 9. Cell-ID allow us to signicantly reduce the grammar size.

In Figure 9 we show the reference architecture. The MS automatically provides its Cell-ID to the Server. The Server limits the grammar size to the addresses in the corresponding cell. Finally the user provides his actual location by voice, e.g. via Margutta 45, to the VXML browser. The ASR recognizes the users vocal input and answers with the points of interest that fall in the users neighborhood. In order to better evaluate how Cell-ID can improve VXML

location based services, we ran some experiments in Rome. The results are shown in Tables 7 and 8. Here, ADDRESSES is the number of elements in the grammar, Tupload is the time to upload the grammar to the server and Trec is the time the recognition process takes to produce a positive or negative output (i.e. it recognizes the vocal input or not). The row A LL shows the results for the grammar made of all Roman addresses. The other rows, show the average, standard deviation, min. and max. of the results for the grammar whose size is reduced by Cell-ID. We ran our experiments over 720 Cell-IDs. We rst built-up a database with all the roman addresses. If we consider only correct and complete inputs (i.e. via Margutta 45) and we do not consider either incomplete inputs (i.e. Margutta, Margutta 45) or partially correct ones (i.e. viale Margutta instead of via Margutta), the grammar consists of about 3400 addresses (see Table 7). The VXML server takes about 7sec. to upload the grammar, while Trec is about 2sec. We observe that the upload time is typically payed once, since the grammar can be cached. In this case, the accuracy of recognition is quite good. In our experiments the system has always recognized the address in input. Nevertheless such a system could be unfriendly, because only correct and complete addresses are recognized. In order to provide a more exible service we allow users to provide either incomplete or even partially correct addresses. In this scenario the grammar size increases to about 45600 entries (see Table 8). In our experiments, the VXML server was unable to manage such a large grammar. We had to reduce the grammar size to about 10000 addresses in order to make the VXML server work properly. With a grammar of 10000 entries, the VXML server takes about 40sec. to upload the grammar and Trec is about 7sec. Furthermore, only about 20% of the inputs are recognized. This poor performances, may be improved by inserting the phonetic transcription of all the grammar entries into the VXML dictionary. This would indeed improve robustness but it has no signicant impact on efciency, which mainly depends on the grammar size. In contrast, the use of Cell-ID can considerably reduce the size of the grammar. Indeed we can reduce the grammar size to only 314 addresses per query in the average. In this setting, the VXML server takes 1.2sec. to upload the grammar and Trec is 0.6sec. Furthermore, accuracy of recognition is excellent (100%). In conclusion, we remark that using Cell-ID we can speed-up the recognition process by more than a factor 10.

4. Conclusions
Cell-ID positioning is inexpensive and it does not require any upgrade of network or terminal equipments. Nevertheless, our experiments show that the quality of Cell-ID loca-

Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004) 1550-6193/04 $20.00 2004 IEEE

A LL R EDUCED (Avg./ Std. Dvt.) R EDUCED (Max.) R EDUCED (Min.)

A DDRESSES 3405 21/15 80 1

Tupload 7 0.6/0.6 0.8 0.5

Trec 2 0.2/0.2 0.3 0.2

References
[1] J. Warrior, E McHenry and K McGee They Know Where You Are. IEEE Spectrum, July, 2003. [2] R. Jana, T. Johnson, S. Muthukrishnan and A. Vitaletti Location based services in a wireless WAN using cellular digital packet data (CDPD). In Proc. MobiDE 2001, pages 7480, 2001. [3] J. Hightower and G Borriello Location Systems for Ubiquitos Computing. Computer, IEEE Computer Society, pages 5766, August, 2001. [4] Durlacher Research Ltd. Location Systems for Ubiquitous Computing. Mobile Commerce Report. [5] G. Ferri Location Based Services. Media Duemila, August, 2002. [6] A. Vitaletti Scheduling Algorithms and Localization Tools for Wireless Networks. Ph.D. Thesis - Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universit di Roma LA Sapienza, a pages 93114, August, 2002. [7] R. Krievs Using fading to improve accuracy of cell id based mobile positioning algorithms: analysis of special cases. Scientic Proceedings of RTU. Series 7. Telecommunications and Electronics, pages 5058, 2002. [8] S. C. Agrawal and S. Agrawal Location Based Services. TATA consultancy services, September, 2003. [9] T. Nypan and K. Gade and T. Maseng Location using Estimated Impulse Response in a Mobile Communication System NORSIG, October, 2001. [10] Making the Most of Legacy Mobiles: Examining the Relationship Between Technology Choices and Location Revenues. BWCS, White paper., September, 2002. [11] J. Krumm, G. Cermak and E. Horvitz RightSPOT: A Novel Sense of Location for a Smart Personal Object. UBICOMP 2003., October, 2003. [12] http://www.voicexml.org/

Table 7. Correct and complete inputs. The grammar of all the roman addresses is made of 3405 entries. Cell-ID allow us to consider only 21 addresses in average speeding up the recognition process by more than a factor ten.

A LL A LL W ORKING R EDUCED (Avg./ Std. Dvt.) R EDUCED (Max.) R EDUCED (Min.)

A DDRESSES 45619 10000 314/280 1136 2

Tupload 40 1.2/1.1 2.3 0.5

Trec 7 0.6/0.5 1.1 0.2

Table 8. Incomplete and partially correct inputs. The grammar of all the roman addresses is made of 45619 entries. The VXML server is not able to manage such a big grammar. Cell-ID allow us to consider only 314 addresses in average.

tion is often not appropriate to deploy even very simple location based services. However, Cell-ID can be exploited to provide more effective and efcient Voice Location-Based Services. Indeed, using Cell-ID we can considerably reduce the size of the recognition grammar, speeding up the recognition process by a factor larger than ten.

5. Acknowledgments
Thanks to S.Muthukrishnan, David Johnson and Rittwik Jana for their support and useful discussions during my stay in AT&T Research Labs. Thanks to Wind L.t.d. for the cooperation and nally thanks to Bill and Luca for their patience and assistance. This work has been partially supported by the Webminds FIRB project of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research.

Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004) 1550-6193/04 $20.00 2004 IEEE