Using GSM CellID positioning for place discovering

Abstract

Mobile phones can be used not only for voice and data communications but also as a computing device running context-aware applications. In this paper we present a model that, based on GSM cell identification, identifies places visited by a user and provides a user familiarity level for each of these places. This information can be used by context-aware applications to adapt their behaviour accordingly to the knowledge its user has about the current location. The achieved results are assessed by overlapping the discovered places with manual collected data, showing that GSM cellID positioning data can be used to identify places that are closer to each other than the average cell radius.