Towards low-cost collaborative mobile positioning

In the lack of an infrastructure-independent solution for an integrated indoor/outdoor positioning, this paper studies the challenges to realize a public and low-cost solution, based on mass users of multiple-sensor mobile phones. Having multiple location sensors in the mobile phones with different levels of accuracy, having many users in the environment which can share their absolute or relative localizations, in addition to the ability of the phones to access external data sources may lead to an integrated algorithms which are called collaborative positioning. The stakeholders of the solution (mobile phones sensors, users, fixed stations and external databases) are involved in an iterative algorithm to estimate or improve the accuracy of each node's position based on statistical models. This paper also provides scenarios and initial solution to the problem of collaborative mobile phone positioning based on signal strength measurement. “Position broadcasting” and “Peer-to-peer correction” has been suggested as possible design approaches.