Passive Mobile Localization Based on the Air Interface Signaling in Cellular Networks

User localization is one of the cutting edge research tops over the world and is very essential for defense science. Localization helps military and security forces to identify and disrupt terrorist plans before committing an offence. This paper proposes an effective and practical localization method in wireless networks. Cellular networks provide measurements regarding the signal attenuations from serving and neighboring base stations for managing radio resources. These measurements can be obtained by using an interceptor during the given call in passive manner from each mobile station. In this paper, we propose a passive mobile location technique which uses an interceptor for gathering these measured information and the timing advance parameter. We show by triangulation that the proposed algorithm can outperforms the angle-of-arrival (AOA) technique without any need for using array antennas and LOS propagation environment.