Less Energy Higher Accuracy: Smartphone Localization via Social Collaboration

The popularity of GPS-enabled smartphones enables a wide variety of new location-based or location-aware services and applications. However, the GPS module in a smartphone produces inaccurate position information and incurs high energy consumption, which inhibits the wide use of locationaware applications. To address this, we propose a social-aided cooperative localization scheme, which is capable of improving positioning accuracy and achieving low energy consumption. Specifically, our scheme enhances positioning accuracy by fusing the GPS positions of multiple co-located smartphones in a social network, or by neighborhood-based weighted least-squares estimation when relative distances between smartphones are available. The energy efficiency is achieved by sharing location information among co-located users so that only a small set of smartphones need to turn on GPS receivers at any time. To validate our proposed approach, we conduct experiments on the Google Android platform. Experimental results show that our proposed cooperative localization scheme can achieve sufficient performance gains in both indoor and outdoor environments.