The main motive of our app is to identify the people trapped at a location during disaster using their IMEI or IMSI number of phones. The first thing that goes down during a disaster is power and along with it goes the mobile networks. So we came up with the idea where rescue workers will carry devices either phones(track people using wifi) or special portable devices(tracking through gsm). This will get all the people(either their wifi mac or imei) in a particular range of that device and giving other people a way to track their relatives using the web portal.
We have used a tv tuner based card to mimic a base station but this couldnt be integrated to the system due to heavy modification required in hardware software to capture all GSM IMEI around it due to limitation of time. Right now we are using peer to peer wifi tracking. This will work in same way, just that here only people with wifi on will be registered to the phone app on rescue worker's phone and it will transmit data back to server after which the people can be tracked on map according to rescue worker's location and range of signal
Its possible to locate all GSM phone's IMEI using USRP(Universal Software Radio Peripheral) and the phone's location can be approximated through the signal range from the base mimicking station. Hence this can be used to approximate location of all the GSM devices in a Disaster hit area and can be plotted on Google Maps.