Localization of mobile terminal in emergency situations

When there is an emergency call, the emergency localization system finds the possible location of the mobile phone user. Existing emergency localization systems are only usable when there is more than one serving base station. This kind of system uses triangulation technique with those serving sites. When the coverage is limited with one station, the existing emergency system gives a huge area that is not enough to determine the exact location. The rescue operations of one English and two Danish tourists got lost on the Lycian road in Turkey on 16 Jan 2015. After the tourists got lost, the battery level of their mobile devices became low and rescue with many calls or using GPS was not an option anymore and even if they had enough battery life the signal strength was too weak. The first searching trials with the existing localization system were not very efficient and gave a large area to explore on the trekking road. The reason for this was that it does not working efficiently with only one base station. This system works more efficiently in the case that there was more than one base station. Contrary to the current system, our new developed system works well even with a single base station. The results using the same data were quite different in comparison to the current system's; the area was reduced up to 70%. This also enabled the rescue team to find the lost tourists sooner and easier with the defined location. A similar incident from 8 Feb 2015 is given as a second example. A couple of mountaineers were lost in the Bozdag Mountains in Turkey. Conditions of the terrain and weather were not suitable to locate them with the current systems. The location of the mountaineers was determined using our method. It uses a propagation model and environmental data (e.g. landscape, antenna type, population distributed clutter maps, path loss etc.) and additionally signaling. Moreover, mobile operators have the ability to access information related to signaling between mobile phone and base stations. In this work, we combined those environmental and user data to reduce the area to be searched in order to find the victim's location easier. What makes this approach more important is that it works efficiently even with weak signal and limited battery of the mobile device in emergencies. For similar cases in the future, this system can be automated as a further improvement to the solution.