Energy efficient GPS sensing with cloud offloading

Location is a fundamental service for mobile computing. Typical GPS receivers, although widely available, consume too much energy to be useful for many applications. Observing that in many sensing scenarios, the location information can be post-processed when the data is uploaded to a server, we design a Cloud-Offloaded GPS (CO-GPS) solution that allows a sensing device to aggressively duty-cycle its GPS receiver and log just enough raw GPS signal for postprocessing. 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. Using our design of a portable sensing device platform called CLEO, we evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of the solution. Compared to more than 30 seconds of heavy signal processing on standalone GPS receivers, we can achieve three orders of magnitude lower energy consumption per location tagging.