https://github.com/evijit/gpspool
- Dat Huynh
- Avijit Ghosh
- Rashika Ramola
The GPS, or Global Positioning System, is an old but reliable system that is used by almost every electronic device to obtain geolocation information. However, although accurate, GPS is an old technology and is extremely power consuming especially for battery operated devices. The capability of mobile phones to join networks and share information can be leveraged to pool the GPS resources among them. For a group of devices in the network, instead of using GPS of all the devices to query current location, we propose to distribute the work of between the devices. Only one device (leader) queries its GPS at one point, while the others obtain this location from leader via Bluetooth. The leadership rotates between all devices and the duration of leadership is proportional each device's battery. We implement this system through an Android application and we observe that the system saves battery collectively.
We propose a framework that only requires a single device from a set of devices to query GPS signals and multi-casts it to others via low-energy Bluetooth channels. We make the work-distribution fair by dividing work on the basis of each device's battery level. Thus low battery devices can prolong their operational time while still contributing GPS signals to the group of devices. When a device finishes sending GPS signals, it will transfer the control to the next device.
- We propose the concept of fairness. The workload of each device is proportional to its battery level to prolong the collective operational time.
- We propose a protocol for synchronous communication for co-ordination between devices
- We introduce 4 types of messages (Leader, Ack, GPS, Transfer) that convey different information among devices
- We develop a scheduling algorithm that collects all devices' battery levels and self-computes the number of GPS messages thus the algorithm constantly adapts to the battery level of each device
- We use Bluetooth protocol for inter-device communication to conserve battery
The path to the file having code for leader election and work distribution is:
gpspool/app/src/main/java/sample/BluetoothActivity.java
To send Bluetooth signals between devices, we use the Ayanda( https://github.com/sabzo/ayanda ) which is an open-source Android library that offers API for Bluetooth communication among devices.