Scalable tracking system for public buses using IoT technologies

Reliability in public transport is of great importance today. Millions of people travelling by public buses waste a lot of time waiting at bus stops. This paper focuses on presenting a solution to tackle the said problem by harnessing IoT technology stack. If the people travelling get accurate real time location of the buses along with estimate time for arrival at bus stop based on the real time traffic conditions, it will facilitate an overall increase in reliability on the public buses. The solution proposed in this paper involves using the existing internet enabled devices on the bus (like the e-ticketing system) or a simple android tablet to capture the real time location and send to the servers. Accessing this location data from servers will be facilitated by Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs which users can access through android application, SMS or web-portals. The system proposed will have distributed architecture in order to tackle high number of requests from users. Although there are existing solutions which harness the use of Global Positioning System (GPS) for bus tracking, they aren't ready to handle high demand on the backend which will exist in the near future. We have addressed this problem. The primary contribution of this paper is that it shows that a backend based on Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) instead of the traditionally used Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) based REST will be light weight, data efficient and scalable. We have proposed and implemented the backend as well as the front end required for the tracking system and presented the improvements.