UniCellular: An Accurate and Ubiquitous Floor Identification System using Single Cell Tower Information

What is it about?

Determining the floor of a user traveling in a multi-story building is highly important. Although some solutions propose using cellular signaling information to do this, they all rely on information from multiple towers, which is not accessible on most commercial phones. Our question was, can we accurately identify the user's floor using only the serving tower? This paper shows that this is possible by handling a number of challenges, where it proposes the first regulatory authority-compliant floor identification system designed to use only the serving cell tower.

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Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Accurate and ubiquitous floor identification is of utmost importance as it helps decrease the search area for the responders and accordingly reduces the emergency response time. Hence, the regulatory authorities require the service providers to estimate the floor of a user within one floor error 80% of the time for positioning E911 calls, which must be met by April 2025. As such, there is an increasing demand for a regulatory authority complaint system.