Proximity-Aware Location Based Collaborative Sensing for Energy-Efficient Mobile Devices

A fundamental question in the study of location-based mobile sensing is how much energy can be saved while still guaranteeing the reliable localization accuracy. In this paper, we analyze key features of human proximity and find a motivation which implies that the energy-efficient and accurate localization is possible by sharing the locations of nearby mobile devices. From the location-based collaborative sensing idea, we formulate an optimization problem which aims to minimize the total number of location measurements for a given fairness criterion. Then, we propose a practical and distributed location sharing (DLS) protocol and an optimal parameter control algorithm (OWD) which makes the DLS protocol attain an asymptotic optimal performance. Via extensive simulations under various environments including real mobility traces, we verify that the proposed DLS+OWD policy significantly reduces the average power consumption of mobile devices with a higher fairness compared to the existing algorithms.