Improving energy efficiency of location sensing on smartphones

Location-based applications have become increasingly popular on smartphones over the past years. The active use of these applications can however cause device battery drain owing to their powerintensive location-sensing operations. This paper presents an adaptive location-sensing framework that significantly improves the energy efficiency of smartphones running location-based applications. The underlying design principles of the proposed framework involve substitution, suppression, piggybacking, and adaptation of applications' location-sensing requests to conserve energy. We implement these design principles on Android-based smartphones as a middleware. Our evaluation results show that the design principles reduce the usage of the power-intensive GPS (Global Positioning System) by up to 98% and improve battery life by up to 75%. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.3.3 [Special-Purpose and Application-Based Systems]: RealTime and Embedded Systems General Terms Design, Experimenta...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Zhenyun Zhuang, Kyu-Han Kim, Jatinder Pal Singh
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Design Principles, Location-Based Applications, MOBISYS 2010, Smartphones