UAV-based Localization of Mobile Phones for Search and Rescue Applications

In this work a system is proposed that utilizes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to search and rescue trapped victims using their mobile phones. The systems consists of two parts, a ground station (GS) and an airborne station (AS). The GS provides a downlink to the UAV, a GSM base station along with antenna equipment and a mobile network jamming device. By using a smart approach to block the synchronization sequences of all base stations in range, the mobile phones of the victims to be located are switching to an emergency fallback mode. In this mode the phones connect to the strongest base station in range, thus the one provided by the GS. By initiating a call to the corresponding phone the AS can localize it using direction-of-arrival detection with a 9-channel phase coherent receiver system.