Patent attributes
To determine the location of a querying mobile device, a request is received from the querying mobile device via a communication network. One or several participating mobile devices that potentially are physically proximate to the querying mobile device are identified. A request to scan for a location broadcast message transmitted by the querying mobile device is sent to the participating mobile devices. One or more location broadcast reports from participating mobile devices are received, where each received location broadcast report indicates that the location broadcast message was received at the corresponding participating mobile device. The location of the querying mobile device is estimated based on (i) the received one or more location broadcast reports and (ii) respective locations of the participating mobile devices from which the one or more location broadcast reports were received.
