Improving energy efficiency of location sensing on smartphones

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%.