Poster abstract: ENav — A smartphone-based energy efficient vehicular navigation system

We present eNav, a smartphone-based vehicular GPS navigation system that has an energy-saving location sensing mode capable of drastically reducing navigation energy needs. Traditional implementations sample the phone GPS at the highest possible rate (usually 1Hz) to ensure constant highest possible localization accuracy. This practice results in excessive phone battery consumption and reduces the attainable length of a navigation session. The seemingly most common solution would be to always use a car-charger and keep the phone plugged-in during navigation at all times. However, according to a comprehensive survey we conducted, only a small percent of people would actually always carry around their phones´ car-chargers and cables, as doing so is inconvenient and defeats the true “wireless” nature of mobile phones. In addressing this problem, eNav exploits the phone´s lower-energy on-board motion sensors for approximate location sensing when the vehicle is sufficiently far from the next navigation waypoint, using actual GPS sampling only when close. Our user study shows that, while remaining virtually transparent to users, eNav can reduce navigation energy consumption by over 80% without compromising navigation quality or user experience.