Wireless Device Location Association Identification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Wireless network operators lack knowledge of multiple devices carried by individual users, hindering user profiling, billing, and network management, as these devices are often not under a common account.
Innovation Solution
A method processes location information to generate location profiles for wireless devices and determines location-similarity metrics among them, identifying devices that are similarly located and associated with a common user, allowing for the generation of device information indicating a location-association.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If wireless network operators manage multiple devices separately under different accounts, then device management and billing remain simple for each individual device, but the operator cannot identify that multiple devices are carried by a single user, limiting user profiling and service optimization capabilities
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces location information as an intermediary element to indirectly identify device associations. Instead of directly tracking device ownership relationships, the system uses location data from multiple sources (cell tower triangulation, GPS, Wi-Fi positioning) as a mediator to infer that devices carried by the same user will exhibit similar location patterns over time, thereby solving the information loss problem without requiring complex direct tracking mechanisms
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback loops where location information is continuously collected, processed, and used to generate device association identifiers. These identifiers then feed back into the network management system to improve future device grouping and user profiling accuracy, creating a self-improving system that gradually enhances its ability to identify commonly carried devices
2Adaptability or versatility
If the operator implements a system to track and identify multiple devices per user, then user profiling and service optimization improve, but the processing and storage requirements for location information increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the essential location information needed for device association identification, rather than processing all available device data. By focusing specifically on location patterns and temporal proximity metrics, the system achieves effective user profiling while minimizing the quantity of information that must be processed and stored
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments the device identification problem into manageable components: collecting location information from multiple independent sources (cell towers, GPS, Wi-Fi), processing each source separately to generate location profiles, and then combining these profiles to determine device associations. This segmentation reduces the overall processing load by breaking down the complex task into smaller, parallelizable operations
3Measurement precision
If location information from multiple sources is collected and processed to generate location profiles, then accurate device association identification is achieved, but the time and computational resources required for processing increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by continuously collecting and pre-processing location information in the background, building location profiles over time before association analysis is needed. This allows the system to have location data ready when device association identification is required, reducing the time needed for actual analysis while maintaining high accuracy through accumulated data
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments disclosed herein provide systems and methods for identifying similarly located wireless devices. In a particular embodiment, a method provides processing location information that indicates past locations of the wireless communication devices to generate location profiles for the wireless communication devices. The method further provides processing groups of the location profiles to determine location-similarity metrics among the location profiles within the groups and determining if any of the location-similarity metrics for any of the groups satisfies a similarity criteria indicating similarly located devices. If one of the location-similarity metrics for one of the groups satisfies the similarity criteria, then the method provides generating device information indicating a location-association among the wireless communication devices that correspond to the location profiles in that one group.