Exploiting Mobility as Context for Energy-Efficient Location-Aware Computing

The “mobility” has two important aspects: i) how to support mobility and ii) how to exploit mobility. This paper considers the latter, while many existing works only consider the former. This work is trying to prove that system performance will be greatly improved by understanding a user’s movement. In this paper, we propose a novel location update protocol, called SLUP which minimizes the energy consumption of a mobile client by exploiting a syntactic information of the user’s movement. This concept is called mobility-awareness. Moreover, there are three variations of the proposed protocol in terms of choosing optimal state: SLUP/BS, SLUP/UITR, and SLUP/IUT 〈Tiut 〉. Experimental results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the well-known protocols such as dead-reckoning and distance-based protocol, that the SLUP/IUT 〈Tiut 〉 approach can achieve difference performance tradeoffs between energy efficiency and location imprecision by fine-tuning its algorithmic parameter Tiut.