Location-aware mobile applications are steadily gaining popularity
across the world. However, lack of Global Positioning
System (GPS) and absence of Wi-Fi infrastructure prevent
users with non-Smartphones (majority of population in developing
countries) from using location-aware applications as their
phones do not have access to their current location. Existing
GSM based approaches such as Cell ID-based works on
non-Smartphones but they require access to a comprehensive
database of Cell IDs. Such a database either does not exist or
is very limited in developing countries.
In this paper, we propose a novel GSM-based approach
of using Cell Broadcast Service (CBS) messages for getting
current location on the phone. Proposed approach does not
depend on a comprehensive database and can run on programmable
low end phones. We demonstrate the effectiveness
of our approach on data collected in New Delhi, India across
two different operators and propose two space-time history
based algorithms to improve upon the localization accuracy of
our baseline CBS approach. The proposed algorithms provide
up to 35% improvement in accuracy over the baseline method.
Further, we compare accuracy of our CBS-based approach with
that of Cell ID-based approach and also, present a multimodal
approach that uses combination of both CBS and Cell ID
(wherever available) to improve the localization accuracy.