Section: New Results

Adaptive sampling frequency of human mobility

Participants : Panagiota Katsikouli [AGORA] , Aline Carneiro Viana, Marco Fiore [CNR] , Diego Madariaga.

In recent years, mobile device tracking technologies based on various positioning systems have made location data collection a ubiquitous practice. Applications running on smartphones record location samples at different frequencies for varied purposes.The frequency at which location samples are recorded is usually pre-defined and fixed but can differ across applications; this naturally results in big location datasets of various resolutions. What is more, continuous recording of locations results usually in redundant information, as humans tend to spend significant amount of their time either static or in routine trips, and drains the battery of the recording device.

In this work, we aim at answering the question “at what frequency should one sample individual human movements so that they can be reconstructed from the collected samples with minimum loss of information?”. Our first analyses on fine-grained GPS trajectories from users around the world unveil (i) seemingly universal spectral properties of human mobility, and (ii) a linear scaling law of the localization error with respect to the sampling interval. Such results were published at a paper at IEEE Globecom 2017.

Building on these results, we challenge the idea of a fixed sampling frequency and present a lightweight mobility aware adaptive location sampling mechanism. This is an on-going work with Panagiota Katsikouli, who spent 5 months in our team working as an internship in 2017, and Diego Madariaga who spent 3 months in 2018 in our team working as an internship and has started a PhD in co-tutelle with Aline C. Viana and Javier Bustos (NIC/Univ. of Chile).

Our mechanism can serve as a standalone application for adaptive location sampling, or as complimentary tool alongside auxiliary sensors (such as accelerometer and gyroscope). In this work, we implemented our mechanism as an application for mobile devices and tested it on mobile users worldwide. Our experiments show that our method adjusts the sampling frequency to the mobility habits of the tracked users, it reliably tracks a mobile user incurring acceptable approximation errors and significantly reduces the energy consumption of the mobile device.

A journal paper is being prepared for submission.