Methods and apparatuses are presented for determining a location of a mobile station. In some embodiments, a mobile station may acquire at least one attribute of a reference base station to obtain the identity of the reference base station. A first and a second locally unique attribute of a local base station may then be acquired. The mobile station may then compute a distance metric from the mobile station to the reference base station based on the at least one attribute, and the first and second locally unique attributes. The location of the mobile station may be determined based at least in part on the distance metric. In some embodiments, the distance metric may include a number of how many base stations away (i.e. “hops” or number of handovers) the mobile station is from the reference base station.