Experimental evaluation of mobile phone sensors

Smart phone has become an important part of people´s daily life. Most of current smart phone are equipped with a rich set of built-in sensors. The mobile applications such as geo-location based video annotation and indoor positioning require precise measurements from sensors. In addition, understanding the sensing performance of a smart phone device is helpful for implementing a mobile application that needs sensor data. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of key sensors in a state of the art smart phone - Google Nexus 4. The sensors chosen in the paper are accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and GPS. Substantial tests have been executed to evaluate the sensors´ accuracy, precision, maximum sampling frequency, sampling period jitter, energy consumption.