Resource Constrained Onboard Controller System for Real-time Fishing Boat Tracking in High Seas

Tracking the location of fishing boats in real-time had been a major concern to families and administrators. The solutions available in the market are either too costly or do not provide real-time tracking. The IoS and Android mobile phones put a lot of restrictions on background location tracking, which makes them unreliable for continuous real-time tracking. A low cost, embedded, real-time location tracking system, built using Raspberry Pi, and GPS sensor onboard, communicating with the server on the shore using long-range WiFi backhaul. This boat tracker system runs on Linux OS, embedded NodeJS server and OceanNet network. This was implemented in 10 boats and has been working for over a year successfully. In this paper, the hardware and software design aspects of the lightweight, network-fault-tolerant, real-time OceanNet boat tracking system along with an analysis of its performance are presented.