COAL: Context Aware Localization for high energy efficiency in wireless networks

Localization is one of the principal enabling wireless services now penetrating into every aspect of our life. Unfortunately, present localization schemes are often inaccurate (based on signal-distance conversion), or energy inefficient (such as GPS), or labor intensive (requiring previous field signal data collection). In this paper, a novel localization scheme named COAL, for COntext Aware Localization, is put forward to aim at both energy efficiency and accuracy. The core idea is to exploit users' context information such as an ongoing event to facilitate the localization scheme. With the facilitation of these context information, localization frequency can be significantly reduced to conserve energy while preserving high degree of accuracy. Besides that, COAL is complementary to existing location schemes using any wireless signal and can be implemented as an enhancement to them.