BlueCat: An Efficient Way for Relative Mobile Localization

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of numerous location-based service for mobile users. The technology of locating the mobile devices has received significant research attention. In this paper, a novel notion-Relative Mobile Localization is proposed, which aims to find whether a group of mobile users (such as persons under guardianship) are in the vicinities of other mobile users (such as guardians). However, the existing physical or logical localization methods require the supporting of the anchor nodes such as satellites, base stations or pre-built databases, which is expensive and may fail in some circumstances such as the environments without receiving good signals of anchors. To address these problems, BlueCat, a novel anchor-free localization method is designed. In this method, the names of Bluetooth devices are used as the communication media. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to code the userfriendly names of devices to achieve interactions between mobile users. We also design an energy-efficient algorithm for saving the limited battery power of devices equipped with Bluetooth modules. The effectiveness of the method is validated by using simulations where real user mobility traces are used.