Improving energy efficiency of location sensing on smartphones

  • Authors:

  • Zhenyun Zhuang;Kyu-Han Kim;Jatinder Pal Singh

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Deutsche Telekom Inc. R&D Lab USA, Los Altos, CA, USA;Deutsche Telekom Inc. R&D Lab USA, Los Altos, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

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 power-intensive 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%.