Hello,
I really need help on how to approach the problem, any insight will be appreciated.
The problem: cellphone tracking
You are to develop a simulated cellphone tracking system which uses information from a number of celltowers to provide the path and current location of cellphone users in range of the towers. The customer is interested in seeing an end-to-end system demonstration and would like to get an idea of where the problems will lie for the real system, but is not too concerned that the system exactly mirrors reality, so you may make some simplifying assumptions on your design.
The model:
A number (10-20?) of celltowers are scattered in an irregular pattern with distances between them ranging from 400m to 3km. Our model of their placement is a number of disks of various sizes with the tower at the center, with no tower lying under the disk of another tower, but almost every spot covered by three or more disks.
Each tower has the MEID (Mobile equipment identifier) for each cellphone which is within its range (disk). The distance to each phone from the tower is continuously monitored by measuring the flight-time in nanoseconds of the signal between the phone and the tower. These measurements are made every 7 seconds for every phone, and are then timestamped, identified as to source (which tower), and then either (a) stored locally at the tower, or (b) sent over the internet to a central data collection facility for storage and processing.
A location query consists of finding the tracking data for a particular MEID and calculating its most recent position. A tracking query continuously calculates and reports location data for an MEID as it is received.
Prelab due Friday 11/15: computational math models of --
- regular array of towers with circular reception regions extending (just) to neighboring towers
- cellphones traveling through tower regions on straight lines at fixed velocity
- timestamps accurate to 1 nsec; flight time measurement error up to +/-3 nsec.
- individual MEID sampling every 7 sec but at different times at different towers.