Energy-Efficient Localization and Tracking on Smartphones: Design Principle and Solutions

In recent years, various location based services (LBS) have witnessed great development and are being prevalently used in our life. However, as the foundation of various LBS applications, localization consumes large energy of resource-constraint mobile terminals, especially on smartphones. This paper explicitly proposes three technical principles, substitution, adaption and collaboration to guide energy-efficient localization and tracking schemes on smartphones. Then several typical schemes in indoor or outdoor environments are respectively summarized and compared under the umbrella of those three principles. Moreover, the context-assisting techniques are also discussed to design energy-efficient LBS applications. Finally, the quantitative metrics to measure the tradeoff between energy and localization performance are summarized. The primary goal of this paper is to comprehensively classify and provide a summary on the sporadic localization schemes (with energy-efficiency as main concern), possible solutions and tradeoffs, and facilitate to develop and deploy the energy-efficient LBS applications.