Designing vehicle tracking system - an open source approach

Vehicle tracking system has been extensively used for fleet management, asset tracking, surveillance, stolen vehicle recovery and many more. Advances in modern technologies like ubiquitous computing, Internet of Things (IoT) coupled with the availability of the economical hardware building blocks is creating a new wave of vehicular tracking systems. In this work we present VERTIGUO (VEhiculaR TrackInG Using Opensource approach), a GPS,GSM and GPRS technology based vehicular tracking system, that is accurate, robust, flexible, economical and feature rich. Unlike the traditional COTS (Commercial Of The Shelf) vehicular tracking system, that are closed and confined to smartphone and PC's, our vehicular tracking system infrastructure is open sourced and is available for the research fraternity to test, experiment and add more features. The hardware (HW) is developed by leveraging our expertize on open source HW platform. The software (SW) infrastructure can track the vehicles through a web interface on smartphones and PC or through an SMS on normal GSM based feature phones. This application will work for all mobile phones provided they are on a GSM network. In this paper we describe our system architecture, prototype and results obtained in our field trials.