Mobile Based Event-Activated Vehicle Tracking in Urban Environments Srinivasa R STG * , Samar Agnihotri † , Prem Jadhupathi ‡ , Revathipathi Namballa ‡ * Intel Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka - 560037, India † Department of Information Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong ‡ Mphasis, Pune, Maharashtra - 411014, India Email: sramki@ieee.org, samar@ie.cuhk.edu.hk, {prem.jadhupathi, revathipathi.n}@mphasis.com Abstract—The ubiquitous nature of present wireless networks makes the real-time and accurate location-tracking of mobile assets a realizable possibility. However, the existing solutions with their high infrastructure and operational costs and technical implementation difficulties are not attractive for practical event- activated asset tracking, control, and diagnostics. In this paper, we provide complete system architecture and a description of fully-functional prototype implementation of a mobile based and event-activated solution for low-cost and real-time asset- tracking in urban environments. The accuracy and stability of the proposed solution is established via rigorous field-trials. I. I NTRODUCTION The widespread availability of the wireless networks makes it possible to utilize these networks for location-tracking appli- cations. The demand for location-tracking applications forms a major component in the current market for wireless applica- tions. Location services were driven initially by emergency and security requirements as public safety feature in response to an order by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1996 [1]. However, current demand for such services is driven by the commercial interests in location-aware products for applications such as monitoring and tracking for secu- rity purposes, mobile advertising, location-sensitive mobile billing, fraud protection, personnel or asset tracking in a given geographical area, interactive shopping and tour guidance, traffic control in parking lots, fleet management, intelligent transport systems that provide real-time traffic information and management, and cellular design system and management, to name a few [2]. All wireless based location-tracking technologies are broadly classified as network based (both, WLANs and cellular networks) and mobile based [2]. The current network based location-tracking technologies determine the position of a mobile device, carried by a personnel or embedded in a vehicle, from the signal parameters received at the base-station. This information in turn is relayed by the base-station to central site or to a home agent for further processing to estimate the exact location of the device. In cellular networks, the infrastructure to support network- based location-tracking is currently available at every mobile operator where the location-tracking data is available at the servers managed by the mobile operator. However, this makes it difficult for an end-user to carry out her own location-based tracking application over a cellular network for two reasons. Fig. 1: Generic tracking solution First, the mobile operator may not share such data due to confidentiality or security concerns. Second, even if the mobile operator can share this data at its servers, an end-user may not be able to implement Events Activated Tracking System (EATS) [3] that may require two-way communication between a mobile device and a server. Present legacy implementations of the cellular systems only provide for passive tracking of mobile devices and mobile operators may not be inclined to modify it to support EATS due the system stability and scalability concerns. Therefore, for the end-user applications, the network based location tracking solutions are ruled out. A typical mobile-based location tracking system [4] consists of a Locator, which can be a simple mobile that estimates its own location or stores the current location parameters such as received signal strength, active and neighboring cell-ids, broadcast and traffic channels etc., from the signals received from neighboring base-stations or a Global Positioning System (GPS) device that obtains information from GPS satellites. The other part of the system is a Communicator or Information Transmitter [5] that can be GSM/EDGE/GPRS modem, which relays this information through cellular network. Other meth- ods for transmitting the estimated location are: a direct TCP/IP CONFIDENTIAL. Limited circulation. For review only. Preprint submitted to 15th International IEEE Annual Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Received March 31, 2012.