A glimpse of energy-efficient location-triggered mobile application design and implementation in data collection scenarios

Abstract

With the prevalence of localization techniques in smart phones, we see the blossom of user-trigger location-based applications in the last few years. However, only minorities of applications can be triggered by the predefined locations without human interaction to perform the associated actions in certain scenarios. One reason is that the inevitable power-intensive operation of location detection by GPS sensor causes battery draining issue. While there exists some work on energy efficiency in continuous location tracking, energy-efficient location detection for matching predefined location of interest has not been fully addressed by previous work. This paper proposes a unified framework for designing energy-efficient location-triggered applications. Our system triggers data collection only when the user reaches pre-defined location of interests. We propose an energy-efficient location detection scheme that support duty-cycles for GPS in cooperation with other on-device sensors intelligently. The results of our real-world experiment demonstrate that mobile devices can reduce the usage of GPS and lower energy consumption significantly in location-triggered applications. © 2012 IEEE.