Energy Efficiency in Smartphones: A Survey on GPS energy conservation

Nowadays, smartphones are growing as more powerful systems which run applications that utilise location based services. Many smartphones devices are equipped with sensors (such as WiFi, GPS the orientation sensor, the acceleration sensor, etc.) which are very powerful, these sensors are used to determine three dimensional position, velocity and time of the mobile device. As GPS is the core location determining device, it is used by many applications which require localization data. But GPS enabler interface consumes an unacceptable energy that causes the faster battery drain of mobile devices. GPS also has poor signal quality and low transmission speed, which makes location determination an expensive operation in battery driven mobility devices. The worst case is, when applications that require single location fix (eg: Foursquare, Flickr etc) and cannot exploit GPS warm start operation. To this end, goal of this paper is to perform survey on various techniques and models which are used to enhance the energy-efficiency of mobile devices and efficiently use location tracking services. Also the paper proposes further feasible technique for increasing energy efficiency.