Microsoft recently published the findings of a research project that aims to improve the energy efficiency of GPS by offloading work to the cloud. From Ghacks:

Do you have the GPS feature of your phone activated at all times or only when you need it? Whenever I activate GPS it seems to use a lot of battery, which is why I make use of the feature rarely and then only when I really need it. The main problem with current technology is that communication takes a long time before the transfer of information to the phone is initiated and completed, and in that time, the power is draining from the phone because of the active chip. Once the data is downloaded, it has to be processed on the phone before it can be presented to the phone’s user which takes additional power away.

There are two core reasons for the high energy consumption of GPS. The data rate at which information are sent from the satellite is 50bps (that is bytes per second) which requires the communication channels to be open for a long time before all data is received. The second issue is the amount of signal processing that is required to establish communication with a satellite due to signal strengths and Doppler frequency shifts.

GPS could soon to be more power efficient thanks to Microsoft