u-blox Sends Data to Millions of Devices and Optimizes Costs Using AWS IoT Core

u-blox is a Swiss company that was founded in 1997. The company has grown over the years and provides location and communication services to support its technology solutions. u-blox built PointPerfect to provide high-precision location data to support emerging use cases, such as autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics. To do that, u-blox needed a scalable way to send precise location data, on demand, to millions of devices within milliseconds.

GNSS receivers use correction services to help resolve errors that are generated as data flows from satellites to Earth. u-blox realized that with conventional technology, it would be challenging to scale its operations for PointPerfect in addition to incurring hefty overhead charges.

Instead, u-blox developed its PointPerfect solution using the message queuing telemetry transport (MQTT) protocol on AWS IoT Core, a fully managed messaging broker, alongside AWS Lambda—a serverless, event-driven compute service—to efficiently scale its operations and transition toward an event-based operational model to drive cost efficiencies.

u-blox has been an AWS customer since 2012, and the main reason for its adoption of AWS was the broad and deep range of capabilities it finds in AWS services. u-blox is also a key strategic partner for AWS IoT ExpressLink, a new service that was launched in 2022 that can be used to quickly and easily develop IoT devices that connect securely to the AWS Cloud. This service powers u-blox’s IoT connectivity modules, making it simple for product developers to configure, provision, and connect devices to cloud services. For its PointPerfect solution, the company wanted to continue using AWS-managed services to deliver the required accuracy and reduce the data communication latency on a scale of millions of IoT devices. “We’ve been on AWS for more than a decade. We love serverless AWS services and the support that lets us focus on solutions rather than routine tasks,” says Rajani Rao, principal engineer at u-blox.

PointPerfect uses AWS IoT Core alongside AWS Lambda, AWS IoT Events—which detects and responds to events from IoT sensors and applications—and other AWS services to optimize its system, broadcasting correction services and publishing data through communication channels to devices.

Instead of treating correction service data as a stream of incoming data, the company applies event-driven architecture that handles data as distinct events. For instance, upon receiving continental data on Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)—fully managed message queuing for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications—an initiation in AWS Lambda would transform this data for different localized nodes and distribute the data through several MQTT topics. When building this unique solution, u-blox worked alongside AWS IoT solutions architects to resolve blockers that would have affected latency as the solution scaled.

u-blox used the new retained message feature of AWS IoT Core to store and forward messages to offline devices when they connect. Working alongside specialist teams at AWS (IoT solutions architects), u-blox could raise the standard limits of its AWS account and understand the implications of its design decisions.

As of 2023, there are thousands of connected devices using PointPerfect, but u-blox expects this number to rise into the millions as high-precision GNSS applications reach mass adoption. With support from the AWS team, u-blox devised a solution that involved grouping devices by geographical location, which lowers communication bandwidth and latency.

“We are confident that our solution scales, so our customers can scale without worry,” says Franco de Lorenzo, head of product services at u-blox. “If they have 1,000 devices or 100,000, customers should experience the same level of performance.”

PointPerfect has a 3–6 cm positional accuracy and a 99.9 percent uptime availability. PointPerfect can also relay correction data to improve the positioning of GNSS receivers in milliseconds. PointPerfect uses less bandwidth compared with other traditional protocols due to the use of AWS IoT Core, which transmits data as discrete packages, making it a better alternative to traditional data-streaming methods.

With an event-driven architecture using AWS Lambda and AWS IoT Events, u-blox has achieved a 20 times cost optimization because it pays only for what it uses and not for the time in between transmissions, as would have been the case had it streamed data 24-7.

At the same time, u-blox can use its new solution to experiment and innovate quickly. “If I want to push the service forward, I can ask the team to experiment and provide feedback quickly,” says de Lorenzo. “The speed achieved after migrating to this architecture on AWS helps me with decision-making from a product perspective.”