Tracking smartphones using low-power sensor nodes

  • Authors:
  • Roman Lim

  • Affiliations:
  • ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Location information about mobile devices can reveal movement patterns of people wearing them. We present a cross-technology approach to track Wi-Fi enabled smartphones using a ZigBee sensor network. Implementing such a system on resource constrained low-power sensor nodes requires means to efficiently process signal strength measurements. We propose a new method to recognize Wi-Fi probe requests on devices that are unable to decode Wi-Fi packets. Initial experiments on a testbed show that it is possible to localize unmodified phones within a building using signal strength measurements.