Faster & accurate GPS system to last several months on single battery charge

[caption id="attachment_44243" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Image Credit: Wikipedia[/caption]

Using GPS on your mobile phones is cool - but not just as cool when you realise that it's sucking battery like anything. It looks like a new proposed GPS system would not only provide a very accurate information about your geo-location but would also be totally light on the power house of your phones. The newly emerging 'real time GPS' system will extract more data from the GPS signals and reduce the power consumption of the sensors to make them last several months or even years on single battery charge. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is planning to acquire more of the GPS reference information from Precise Ephemeris (PE) and Earth Orientation Parameter Prediction (EOPP) data files. This is sort of 'crowdsourcing' of the information from GPS ground station operators all over the world. The GPS would go light on the battery by offloading the location related computations to the cloud. Microsoft's #-Link-Snipped-# on the subject revealed that the overall power consumption of the system would be reduced drastically, allowing the system to function for approximately 1.5 years on single battery charge.

Via: Faster GPS that won’t kill your battery via the cloud, and a crowd | Ars Technica