Improving Energy Efficiency of Location Sensing on Smartphones

Zhenyun Zhuang1, Kyu-Han Kim2, Jatinder Pal Singh2
1GNAN Research Group
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
2Deutsche Telekom R&D Laboratories USA
Los Altos, CA

The 8th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MOBISYS 2010), San Francisco, CA, June 15-18th, 2010.


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 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%.


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