Patent awarded for Adaptive Location Data Buffering

U.S. Patent # 8,718,671 – Adaptive Location Data Buffering for Location-Aware Applications was issued today to researchers at the Center for Urban Transportation Research and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at USF.  This patent covers technology used in mobile tracking apps which supports the use of an unreliable protocol (e.g., UDP) to transmit location data from a mobile device to a server in real-time, while occasionally checking if a connection with the server exists using a reliable protocol (e.g., TCP).  If a reliable connection fails, location data is buffered on the device until the next successful reliable connection.  This allows energy and data-efficient communication of real-time tracking information, while still providing some measure of reliability.  More at http://www.locationaware.usf.edu/ongoing-research/technology/adaptive-location-data-buffering/ and http://www.locationaware.usf.edu/ongoing-research/technology/laisyc/.