SmartCoop Algorithm: Improving Smartphones Position Accuracy and Reliability through Collaborative Positioning

In recent years, our society has been preparing for a paradigm shift toward the hyper-connectivity of urban areas. This highly anticipated rise of connected smart city centers is led by the development of low-cost connected smartphone devices owned by each one of us. In this context, the demand for low-cost, high-precision localization solutions is driven by the development of novel autonomous systems. The creation of a collaborative network will take advantage of the large number of connected devices in today’s city center. This paper validates the positioning performance increase of Android low-cost smartphones device present in a collaborative network. The assessment will be made on both simulated and collected smartphone’s GNSS raw data measurements. We propose a collaborative method based on the estimation of distances between network mobile users contributing to a SMARTphone COOPerative Positioning algorithm (SmartCoop). Previous analysis made on smartphone data allow us to generate simulated data for experimenting our cooperative engine in nominal conditions. The evaluation and analysis of this innovative method shows a significant increase of accuracy and reliability of smartphones positioning capabilities. Position accuracy improves by more than 3m, in average, for all smartphones within the collaborative network.