Energy-Efficient Collaborative Localization for Participatory Sensing System

Location based services are getting increasingly popular in participatory sensing systems. They make use of location information on the mobile devices to support applications that improve personal health, object search, and entertainment. However, GPS positioning consumes a lot of energy, which can drain a mobile device's battery. Although WiFi localization and cell tower localization have been suggested as alternatives, they have lower localization accuracy and limited coverage. In this paper, we suggest a novel solution for multiple mobile devices to perform collaborative localization to reduce energy consumption and provide accurate localization. We divide the mobile devices into two groups, the aggregator group and the collector group. The aggregator group turns on their GPS periodically, while the collector group uses the locations of the aggregators to estimate their own locations. We formulate the aggregator set selection problem and propose two novel algorithms to minimize the energy consumption in collaborative localization. Simulations with real traces showed that our proposed solution can save up to 88% of the energy of the entire network.