On the design of energy-efficient location tracking mechanism in location-aware computing

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Song, MoonBae | Kang, Sang-Won | Park, KwangJin

Affiliations: Distributed Systems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Korea University 1, 5-Ga, Anam-Dong, Sungbuk-Gu, Seoul 136-701, Korea

Note: [] Corresponding author: MoonBae Song. Tel.: +82 2 924 0547; Fax: +82 2 953 0771; E-mail: mbsong@disys.korea.ac.kr

Abstract: The battery, in contrast to other hardware, is not governed by Moore's Law. In location-aware computing, power is a very limited resource. As a consequence, recently, a number of promising techniques in various layers have been proposed to reduce the energy consumption. The paper considers the problem of minimizing the energy used to track the location of mobile user over a wireless link in mobile computing. Energy-efficient location update protocol can be done by reducing the number of location update messages as possible and switching off as long as possible. This can be achieved by the concept of mobility-awareness we propose. For this purpose, this paper proposes a novel mobility model, called state-based mobility model (SMM) to provide more generalized framework for both describing the mobility and updating location information of complexly moving objects. We also introduce the state-based location update protocol (SLUP) based on this mobility model. An extensive experiment on various synthetic datasets shows that the proposed method improves the energy efficiency by 2 ∼ 3 times with the additional 10% of imprecision cost.

Keywords: location update protocol, energy efficiency, moving objects database, mobile computing, location-aware computing

Journal: Mobile Information Systems, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 109-127, 2005