Energy-Aware Communities Using Mobile Clients

This article distinguishes two aims: (1) to showcase an approach to identify clusters of users of mobile devices on the basis of shared common attributes, and (2) to investigate a social network-based awareness campaign which shows significant promise to reduce the individual´s as well as the group´s energy consumption. One possible way of progressively driving down the power consumption of individuals is to improve real-time and fine-grained awareness of their energy signature (or carbon footprint) relative to their peers. In this paper, we explore the possibility to support such an awareness program using gossiping in a network of mobile clients. We identify and address key challenges, namely how to propagate required information and, critically, how to filter out meaningless and / or counter-productive comparisons by detecting (through machine-learning techniques) boundaries between user communities. Results of a preliminary simulation study designed for evaluating performance in terms of our framework´s ability to identify suitable comparison groups and to subsequently drive down the number of false positives / negatives are presented.