Energy Efficiency on Location Based Applications in Mobile Cloud Computing: A Survey

With the emergence of mobile cloud computing (MCC), an increasingly number of applications and services becomes available on mobile devices. In the meantime, the constrained battery power of mobile devices makes a serious impact on user experience. As one increasingly prevalent type of applications in mobile cloud environments, location based applications (LBAs) present some inherent limitations surrounding energy. For example, the GPS (Global Positioning System) based positioning mechanism is well-known to be extremely power-hungry. Due to the severity of the issue, considerable researches have been devoted to energy-efficient locating sensing mechanism in the last few years. These efforts toward enhancing energy efficiency have allowed us to provide a comprehensive survey of recent work on low-power design of LBAs. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.