A power-aware middleware for location & context aware mobile apps with cloud computing interaction

Nowadays mobile devices, represented mainly by smartphones, are used by million of people around the world. These smartphones include a large set of hardware capabilities and sensors which allow to improve the user interaction and content delivery. The sensors allow to gather extra information about the user situation and therefore to create location & context aware mobile apps. However, sensors usage involves energy consumption, which is also one of the smartphone's biggest limitations; in addition, these devices also have storage and memory constraints, and slow processors compared to a conventional computer. Recently, there is an emerging tendency consisting in lessen these limitations by implementing the complex computations and data storage in external entities such as cloud computing. This article presents the fundamentals for developing an energy-aware middleware for the support of context & location aware mobile apps with cloud computing interaction. This middleware can increase up to three times the smartphone battery performance when using the GPS receiver, and in the cloud can perform the extraction of places of interest from a list of GPS fixes uploaded by the smartphone.