An Economic Tracking Scheme for GPS-GSM Based Moving Object Tracking System

Many tracking systems are based on the Global Positioning System (GPS), Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) and smart phones, due to their wide availability and reliability. A moving object to be tracked, it sends its GPS coordinates to the observer via SMS. However, the economic feasibility of these systems mainly depends on the total cost of the used SMS messages. In this paper, an economic tracking scheme is proposed to reduce the tracking cost. A GPS-GSM tracking system that uses the proposed scheme is implemented and tested together with two classical tracking systems under two practical test cases. The first test case is a 121 km vehicle trip and the second is a 2.4 km walking journey. The results showed the effectiveness and economic feasibility of the proposed system, which achieved a saving in tracking cost up to about 64% with respect to the tested classical systems.