Improving the energy performance of GPS receivers for location tracking applications

Integrated GPS receivers have become a basic module in location based services, such as position sharing, wild animal monitoring, and location tracking. However, GPS modules have a serious battery drain problem due to their high computation load. This paper aims to reveal the impact of key software parameters on GPS energy consumption, by establishing an energy model for a standard GPS receiver architecture as found in both academic and industrial designs. In particular, our measurements show that the receiver's energy consumption is in large part linear with the number of tracked satellites. This leads to a design of selective tracking algorithm that provides similar positioning accuracy (around 12m) with a subset of selected satellites, which translates to an energy saving of 22.7%.