IEEE/ACM TRANSACTIONS ON NETWORKING 1 Extend Your Journey: Considering Signal Strength and Fluctuation in Location-based Applications

Abstract—Reducing the communication energy is essential to facilitate the growth of emerging mobile applications. In this paper, we introduce signal strength into location-based applications to reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices for data reception. First, we model the problem of data fetch scheduling, with the objective of minimizing the energy required to fetch location-based information without impacting the application’s seman-tics adversely. To solve the fundamental problem, we propose a dynamic-programming algorithm and prove its optimality in terms of energy savings. Then, we perform postoptimal analysis to explore the tolerance of the al-gorithm to signal strength fluctuations. Finally, based on the algorithm, we consider implementation issues. We have also developed a virtual tour system integrated with existing web applications to validate the practicability of the proposed concept. The results of experiments conducted based on real-world case studies are very encouraging and demonstrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm towards signal strength fluctuations. Index Terms—Energy-efficient optimization, signal strength, signal fluctua-tion, cellular data fetch scheduling, location-based applications