Accuracy Evaluation of Location Service Modes on Mobile Devices

The widespread use of location-based services requires accurate user positioning information provided by location sensing systems. To facilitate destination searching and navigation tasks, both outdoors and indoors, mobile device users can use navigation services such as Google maps together with location services, which use information from cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Global Positioning System (GPS) networks to determine approximate locations. Mobile devices offer three kinds of location service modes: high accuracy, battery saving, and device only. The default high-accuracy mode is most used but it rapidly consumes battery life. In this study, we investigated the accuracies of the three location modes in various scenarios, and used scatterplots in R software to visually display and evaluate positioning accuracies. The experimental results show that for static locations, in an indoor environment, the batterysaving mode is most accurate, while in the outdoor environment, the device-only mode is most accurate, the high-accuracy mode is second, and the battery-saving mode is the least accurate. Finally, we perform dynamic positioning at locations on an outdoor route, and find that the high-accuracy mode is the most accurate when the mobile device is in motion.