Book Description
Since its introduction to the public in 1994, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been used in every aspect of our lives. While GPS works just fine most of the times, such as navigating an unknown city using a portable GPS unit or soldiers using it in the battle field, scenarios arise where GPS fails as a reliable positioning and localization system; like inside buildings and tunnels. Cooperative localization using cellular phones would solve this problem since there is a much higher number of information sources (other surrounding cellular users) that are much closer to the user, whereas the GPS system only has a limited number of information sources which are thousands of kilometers away. Spoofing, although not popular in GPS, is a topic of a few research papers. With the introduction of cooperative localization, spoofing will be easier to implement and harder to defend against. Not much research has been done to study the effects of spoofing attacks on cooperative localization networks. In this dissertation, it is shown that reliable positioning and localization is possible using cooperative localization through cellular networks. In addition, it proves that processing sufficient information from a number of information transmitting users can mitigate spoofing attacks on any network. This can be done by filtering out the extreme location estimations resulting from the spoofing attacks. Since Kalman filter helps in predicting the movement of mobile users, using Kalman filter for mobile network users significantly helped reduce the error in estimating the user’s location.