Microsoft 'CO-GPS' Cloud Technology Saves Significant Battery Power

GPS chips are notorious for depleting the battery power of mobile devices, and Microsoft recently announced technology to address this problem. Dubbed "cloud-offloaded GPS," or CO-GPS, a Microsoft study claims significant energy savings, and even suggests that devices can be made with smaller batteries and lighter overall weight when equipped with CO-GPS. CO-GPS saves energy by aggressively off-loading data acquisition and GPS signal processing to a cloud-based service, rather than conducting the work on the device itself. "Leveraging publicly available information such as GNSS satellite ephemeris and an Earth elevation database, a cloud service can derive good quality GPS locations from a few milliseconds of raw data," state the three authors of a just-published study on the topic. This technology is similar to assisted GPS, or AGPS, already widely used, but off-loads much more processing work and energy-intenstive GPS location tasks to the cloud. Image © Microsoft