Low-Cost Mobile GPS Tracking Solution

This paper proposes and implements a low-cost GPS tracking system using GPS and GPRS on cheap mobile phone devices. The proposed system allows a user to view real time positioning and recorded tracks of a mobile phone adapted for the system. It reads the current GPS location of the mobile phone device using a GPS Receiver which may be external to or integrated in the device and sends data to a GSM network via GPRS where the data is forwarded to a main server database. A web application has been developed using PHP and MySQL and the free version of Google Maps APIs is used for the location visualization. The system also use the free email-text messaging attribute of the two major mobile network operators in Mauritius namely Orange and Emtel, to send Geofence alerts to the users if in case an adapted mobile phone device has reached a restricted zone set through the web application. This system has also been built in an intelligent way to send data to the server at the lowest cost possible. It is very useful for fleet management, family monitoring, and can be adapted to the needs of any user. The system meets its objective of being low-cost and is even the cheapest system developed with many functionalities of all existing tracking systems investigated.