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Energy-accuracy trade-off for continuous mobile device location

Published: 15 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Mobile applications often need location data, to update locally relevant information and adapt the device context. While most smartphones do include a GPS receiver, it's frequent use is restricted due to high battery drain. We design and prototype an adaptive location service for mobile devices, a-Loc, that helps reduce this battery drain. Our design is based on the observation that the required location accuracy varies with location, and hence lower energy and lower accuracy localization methods, such as those based on WiFi and cell-tower triangulation, can sometimes be used. Our method automatically determines the dynamic accuracy requirement for mobile search-based applications. As the user moves, both the accuracy requirements and the location sensor errors change. A-Loc continually tunes the energy expenditure to meet the changing accuracy requirements using the available sensors. A Bayesian estimation framework is used to model user location and sensor errors. Experiments are performed with Android G1 and AT&T Tilt phones, on paths that include outdoor and indoor locations, using war-driving data from Google and Microsoft. The experiments show that a-Loc not only provides significant energy savings, but also improves the accuracy achieved, because it uses multiple sensors.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiSys '10: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
June 2010
382 pages
ISBN:9781605589855
DOI:10.1145/1814433
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 June 2010

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Author Tags

  1. GPS energy
  2. continuous location
  3. location-based applications

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  • (2022)Can I Trust This Location Estimate? Reproducibly Benchmarking the Methods of Dynamic Accuracy Estimation of LocalizationSensors10.3390/s2203108822:3(1088)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Using smartphone-GPS data to quantify human activity in green spacesPLOS Computational Biology10.1371/journal.pcbi.101072518:12(e1010725)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
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