Performance Assessment of Geo-triggering in Small Geo-fences: Accuracy, Reliability, and Battery Drain in Different Tracking Profiles and Trigger Directions

Geo-fencing has been predicted to be a multi-billion dollar market inareas such as retail, ambient intelligence, entertainment, healthcare, etc. Businesses have been adopting geo-fencing technology, and now there are several platform providers such as Google, Qualcomm, Esri, Urban Airship, and others. These tools are continuing to attract application developers; however, best practices for choosing the specific performance options within this technology is still ambiguous. For example, Esri provides a geo-trigger service that allows developers to send targeted messages to users when they enter, exit, or dwell in a geo-fenced area. This service also provides the ability to choose higher levels of accuracy or battery saving by offering different location tracking profiles. This paper investigated two geo-trigger tracking profiles (Fine and Adaptive) to assess their performance in small, outdoor, geo-fenced areas; these two profiles are the most accurate but vary in their battery-use. The results show the Adaptive tracking profile to provide 100% reliability and average accuracy of 68.53 meters in geo-fences between 20-70 meter radii. In addition, the Adaptive tracking profile saved 15.20% battery-life while the user is stationery and 9.23% while the user is moving.