A Quantitative Analysis of Power Consumption for Location-Aware Applications on Smart Phones

The industry is producing new wireless mobile devices, such as smart phones, at an ever increasing pace. In terms of processors and memory, these devices are as powerful as the PCs were one decade ago. Therefore, they are perfectly suitable to become the first real-life platforms for ubiquitous computing. For instance, they can be programmed to run location-aware applications that provide people with real-time information relevant to their current places. Deploying such applications in our daily life, however, requires a good understanding of their power requirements in order to ensure that mobile devices can indeed support them. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of power consumption for location-aware applications in our SmartCampus project, which builds a large scale test-bed for mobile social computing. Based on this analysis, we conclude that carefully designed applications can run for up to six hours, while updating the user location frequently enough to support real-time location-aware communication.