Cost Minimization of GPS-GSM Based Vehicle Tracking System

Many vehicle tracking systems are based on Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) due to the wide areas covered by these services. In these systems, the GPS coordinates of a moving vehicle is encapsulated in an SMS and transmitted to the monitoring server. In this paper, a GPS-GSM based system is designed and implemented to economically track vehicles moving over wide geographical areas. A scheme is proposed to reduce the number and cost of the used SMS messages. Performance evaluation under hypothetical and practical test cases showed the capability of the proposed system to achieve significant cost reduction. The proposed system also provides a trade-off between cost reduction and tracking accuracy. This enables the designer to select suitable system parameter values to minimize the cost for a given level of tracking accuracy.