A Game-Changing Mindset in the Field of Sensor Networks

Microsoft Research paper on low energy GPS sensing (called Cloud-Offloaded GPS or CO-GPS) received the Best Paper Award at ACM SenSys’12. Many considered the paper as the best example of the new direction that the community is taking -- from focusing primarily on low power wireless networking to covering broadly sensing, data, and low power devices.

SenSys is the premier conference on networked embedded sensing system and a top forum for sensor network research community. This paper describes a game-changing way to perform location sensing by splitting GPS signal acquisition and processing between embedded devices and the cloud. By logging only a few milliseconds of raw GPS signals, the device can store enough information for resolving GPS-based location with 2~3 orders of magnitude less energy consumption than standalone or mobile phone GPS sensors. The signals are then sent to the cloud with sensor data to reconstruct the location and time that the samples are taken. In delay tolerant data acquisition applications such as animal tracking, float sensor networks, participatory environmental sensing, and long range time synchronization, CO-GPS is the ideal way to extend mobile device battery life. For example, the CO-GPS approach is a key enabling technology in Microsoft Research Project CLEO, a participatory environmental sensing system that we will showcase at the upcoming 2012 AGU Fall Meeting.

Congratulation to Jie and his team!

Reference: Energy Efficient GPS Sensing with Cloud Offloading, Jie Liu, Bodhi Priyantha, Ted Hart, Heitor Ramos, Antonio Loureiro, and Qiang Wang, The 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2012), Toronto, ON, Canada, Nov, 2012 (https://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=172624).