Energy-efficient and accurate fingerprinting-based localization system for smartphones

New location-aware smartphones applications making use of positioning information, are recently gaining an increasing diffusion although the same accuracy provided by those classical solutions, based on the well known GPS technology, is progressively reached by adopting new or revised less power-hungry communication technologies. Starting from this general framework and taking into account the novel green communication paradigm, the paper a cost-effective and energy-efficient 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) also achieving an energy consumption reduction of about 38% respect to the classical GPS solutions.