Tracking mobile users via standard routing engines

Abstract

We consider the problem of estimating the route of a mobile user based on the corresponding cellular trace. We are given the sequence of cell sites to which the user's mobile device connects, and we wish to find the most plausible route that corresponds to the sequence. We present an algorithm called RecursiveCellRoute that makes repeated calls to a standard third-party routing engine. At each stage of the algorithm we examine whether the current route is sufficiently close to all the cell sites in the input sequence. If that is not the case then we use a far away cell as an intermediate routing point and make recursive calls to the routing engine. We compare this approach against the Cell* algorithm of Leontiadis et al. Cell* works by making direct calls to the A* algorithm in which the length of a street is adjusted based on the distance to the input cell sequence.