Design and Implementation of Real Time Vehicle Tracking System Muhammad Adnan Elahi 1 , Yasir Arfat Malkani 2 , Muhammad Fraz 1 1 Department of Engineering and Design, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK 2 Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK ravian122@gmail.com,y.a.malkani@sussex.ac.uk,muhammad.fraz@gmail.com Abstract— Tracking systems were first developed for the shipping industries to determine the position of ships and boats in the sea. Initially passive systems were developed to support in tracking and navigation for location-based applications. For the applications that require real time location information of the vehicle, these systems cannot be employed, because they store the location information in the internal storage that can only be accessed when vehicle is available. Recently, Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems are developed and deployed in numerous environments. These systems are capable of transmitting vehicle’s location information in real time. In these systems, the device installed in the vehicle can transmit the location information in real time to a remote data centre, instead of storing into local storage, using some radio network. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a real time AVL system that incorporates a hardware device installed in the vehicle and a remote Tracking Server (TS). Key words—automatic vehicle tracking, GSM/GPRS, positioning I. INTRODUCTION Most of the modern vehicle’s tracking systems belong to the category of Automatic-Vehicle-Location (AVL) systems. Figure 1 illustrates the generic architecture of an AVL system. Figure 1: Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system AVL systems aid in determining the geographic positioning information of vehicles and transmitting it to a remotely located server. The vehicle’s location is determined using GPS, while the transmission mechanism can be satellite, terrestrial radio or cellular connection from the vehicle to a radio receiver, satellite or nearby cell tower. There may also exists some other alternatives for determining the location in the environments where GPS signal strength is poor, such as dead reckoning [1], i.e. inertial navigation, active RFID systems [2] or cooperative RTLS systems [3]. After collecting positioning data, it is transmitted using some kind of telemetry or wireless communications systems. GSM is the most common used service for this purpose [4, 5]. In this paper, we are presenting our experience of developing an AVL system using GPS for positioning information and GSM/GPRS for information transmission. The design and implementation of the system includes acquisition and transmission of vehicle’s location information along with ignition and doors status information to the monitoring station/tracking server. Additionally, system also provides a web based interface to display all transmitted information to end user along with location of vehicle on a map. There are two basic components of the system: a hardware device called In- Vehicle-Unit (IVU) and a remote Tracking Server (TS). IVU has GPS receiver that receives signals from GPS satellites and calculates its position. This information is transmitted to TS using GSM/GPRS modem on GSM network. The information can be transmitted using SMS on GSM network or using direct TCP/IP connection with TS through GPRS. TS also has GSM/GPRS modem that receives vehicle’s location information via GSM network and stores this information in a database. This information is available to authorized users of the system via website over the internet. The rest of this paper is organised as follows: Section II describes the design and implementation details of the proposed system. It covers the hardware and software design of devices developed to determine and transmit the vehicle’s information, such as its location, to the remote TS. It also discusses the design of hardware used on the TS side, and the design of web based interface for user interaction. Section III discusses system testing and results. Section IV presents future work and concludes the paper. II. SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION A. System Architecture Figure 2: High-level architecture of the system