Accurate and energy-efficient localization system for smartphones: A feasible implementation

We are currently witnessing the increasing diffusion of new location-aware smartphones applications that make intensive use of positioning information, however, the widespread and pervasive GPS technology is gradually giving way to new or revised less power-hungry communication technologies able to guarantee almost the same accuracy. Within this general context, mainly motivated by the current green communication paradigm, this paper proposes an energy-efficient and cost-effective localization architecture based on the improvement of classical cell-tower schemes coupled with a dynamic fingerprinting update phase in order to face the natural changes in the radio environments. The proposed system architecture has been implemented and tested in a real scenario to measure the performances in terms of accuracy and energy saving that will make it preferable to the traditional GPS-based systems in the next future. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the considered approach that makes possible to estimate the current position of a mobile user with a very small error (≈ 20m).