SmartDC: Mobility Prediction-based Adaptive Duty Cycling for Everyday Location Monitoring

Monitoring a user's mobility during daily life is an essential requirement in providing advanced mobile services. While extensive attempts have been made to monitor user mobility, previous work has rarely addressed issues with predictions of temporal behavior in real deployment. In this paper, we introduce SmartDC, a mobility prediction-based adaptive duty cycling scheme to provide contextual information about a user's mobility: time-resolved places and paths. Unlike previous approaches that focused on minimizing energy consumption for tracking raw coordinates, we propose efficient techniques to maximize the accuracy of monitoring meaningful places with a given energy constraint. SmartDC comprises unsupervised mobility learner, mobility predictor, and Markov decision process-based adaptive duty cycling. SmartDC estimates the regularity of individual mobility and predicts residence time at places to determine efficient sensing schedules. Our experiment results show that SmartDC consumes 81% less energy than the periodic sensing schemes, and 87% less energy than a scheme employing context-aware sensing, yet it still correctly monitors 90% of a user's location changes within a 150-second delay.