Experimental evaluation of mobile phone sensors

Smart phone has become an important part of people's daily life. Most of current smart phone are equipped with a rich set of built-in sensors. The mobile applications such as geo-location based video annotation and indoor positioning require precise measurements from sensors. In addition, understanding the sensing performance of a smart phone device is helpful for implementing a mobile application that needs sensor data. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of key sensors in a state of the art smart phone - Google Nexus 4. The sensors chosen in the paper are accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and GPS. Substantial tests have been executed to evaluate the sensors' accuracy, precision, maximum sampling frequency, sampling period jitter, energy consumption.