Observing a moving subscriber on the basis of handover commands

摘要

A location of a subscriber can be observed by means of a mobile network in a completely anonymous way, without a subscriber identifier or a temporary subscriber identifier. At first, a method extracts from a first time slot of a radio channel a message which includes information about a second time slot of a radio channel. The first time slot of a radio channel discloses the current cell of the subscriber and the second time slot of a radio channel discloses a new cell of the subscriber. A location of the subscriber is determined on the basis of the current and the new cell. This location is approximately situated in a geographical intersection area of the current and the new cell. Different kinds of statistics can be deduced from the observations concerning activities of subscribers.