Many emerging smartphone applications require position information to provide location-based or context-aware services. In these applications, GPS is often preferred over its alternatives such as GSM/WiFi based positioning systems because it is known to be more accurate. However, GPS is extremely power hungry. Hence a common approach is to periodically duty-cycle GPS. However, GPS duty-cycling trades-off positioning accuracy for lower energy. A key requirement for such applications, then, is a positioning system that provides accurate position information while spending minimal energy.

In this paper, we present RAPS, rate-adaptive positioning system for smartphone applications. It is based on the observation that GPS is generally less accurate in urban areas, so it suffices to turn on GPS only as often as necessary to achieve this accuracy. RAPS uses a collection of techniques to cleverly determine when to turn on GPS. It uses the location-time history of the user to estimate user velocity and adaptively turn on GPS only if the estimated uncertainty in position exceeds the accuracy threshold. It also efficiently estimates user movement using a duty-cycled accelerometer, and utilizes Bluetooth communication to reduce position uncertainty among neighboring devices. Finally, it employs celltower-RSS blacklisting to detect GPS unavailability (e.g., indoors) and avoid turning on GPS in these cases. We evaluate RAPS through real-world experiments using a prototype implementation on a modern smartphone and show that it can increase phone lifetimes by more than a factor of 3.8 over an approach where GPS is always on.