2018 International Conference on Advanced Science and Engineering (ICOASE), Kurdistan Region, Iraq

Cost Minimization of GPS-GSM Based Vehicle

Tracking System

Fatima Nadhim Ameen Ziad Saeed Mohammed Abdulrahman Ikram Siddiq

Department of Computer Engineering Department of Computer Engineering Department of Electronic and Control Eng.,
Technical College, Northern Technical Technical College, Northern Technical Technical College, Northern Technical
University University University
Mosul, Iraq Mosul, Iraq Kirkuk, Iraq
fatema.n.ameen@gmail.com dr.ziadsaeed@gmail.com draisiddiq@gmail.com

Abstract—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.
Keywords—Tracking systems, GPS, GSM, Threshold,
Microcontroller, Android application, Tracking protocol.
I. INTRODUCTION
Moving object tracking has many useful applications. It
has been used at different scales ranging from indoors
applications to tracking vehicles travelling hundreds of
kilometers on earth’s surface up to tracking ships and air
planes moving around the globe [1]. The implementation of
tracking systems has become easier due to the widely
available Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global
System for Mobile communications (GSM) services, and the
widely spread smart phones. Nowadays, the majority of smart
phones are equipped with GPS modules, and they can be
loaded by easily customizable mobile application programs.
Therefore, in vehicle tracking systems, it is more feasible to
use smart phones as the position detection sensors, rather than
other dedicated hardware. Vehicle tracking systems may be
designed in a peer to peer scheme [2], or mostly they are
designed as a client-server system. In the latter, there is a
central server (mobile or fixed) used to monitor and track
many moving units [3,4,5,6,7,8]. A class of vehicle tracking
systems depend on the Internet as the communication medium
between the moving units and the central server
[9,10,11,12,13,14]. In Iraq, as an example, the coverage and
availability of Internet is lower than that of GSM systems.
That is, in contrast to GSM, the Internet service may witness
sudden cut due to security and many governmental reasons.
Therefore, in such regions it is more suitable to use the
second class of vehicle tracking systems which depends on
the GSM, namely the Short Message Service (SMS), as the
communication backbone. These tracking systems are
developed in the literature for applications such as moving
vehicle tracking [15,16], vehicle status monitoring [17,18],
car antitheft [19]. A common feature in these systems is the
relatively high tracking cost [18]. For accurate vehicle
tracking, more SMS messages are needed, resulting in more
cost. A typical classical vehicle tracking system based on
GPS and GSM consists of a central server equipped with a
GSM transceiver and many moving units, usually smart
phones, loaded by a suitable application program. The server
is used by the observer to monitor and archive the positions
of the moving units. The server sends a position request to
the smart phones which respond either once or periodically
by sending their GPS coordinates as SMS messages to the
server in the manual or periodic modes of operation,
respectively [1].
A key parameter that affects the feasibility of this tracking
system is the overall cost of the SMS messages, C, over the
observation time period, Tobs. This cost is directly
proportional to the total number of exchanged SMS messages
denoted by N. That is, the less number of SMS messages is
used, the less is the overall cost. For a given single SMS
message cost CSMS, which is determined by the specific
GSM operator, then, the total cost is
𝐶 = 𝑁 𝐶𝑆𝑀𝑆 (1)
In the case of manual tracking mode, the total number of
SMS messages required to complete the tracking operation is
equal to the sum of the M position request SMS messages
and M response SMS messages, i.e., N = 2M, where M is the
number of moving units. However, N is irreducible in this
mode and hence the total cost C is also cannot be reduced.
Whereas, in the periodic tracking mode, there are M position
request messages from the server to the moving units, and
MTobs/T response SMS messages during the observation
time, assuming an SMS is transmitted regularly every T
seconds. Then, the total number of SMS messages in the
periodic mode is given as

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 2018 International Conference on Advanced Science and Engineering (ICOASE), Kurdistan Region, Iraq

𝑁 = 𝑀 (1 +
𝑇𝑜𝑏𝑠
) (2)
𝑇
In this work, it is proposed to modify the conventional Android
application program of the moving units such that the number
of the used SMS messages given in Eq. (2) is reduced
according to a pre-selected level of tracking accuracy. The
proposal is implemented by ignoring sending GPS coordinates
to the server as long as the object motion distance is less than a
given threshold distance. In this paper, a server-client GPS-
GSM based vehicle tracking system is designed and
implemented. The proposed tracking scheme is used to
minimize the needed number of SMS messages and to reduce
the tracking cost with respect to similar systems. The proposed
system provides a useful trade-off between tracking accuracy
and cost. It enables the designer to optimize the system to better
fit the requirements and available resources of the specific
application.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II,
presents a general description of the proposed tracking system.
In Section III, the implementation of hardware and the software
protocols are illustrated. The performance of the proposed
system is evaluated and compared to similar conventional
systems in Section IV. Finally, conclusions are given in Section
V.
II. PROPOSED SYSTEM
achieved. It should be noted that this advantage is achieved at
the expense of lower tracking accuracy. Therefore, the
threshold distance and T values are case dependent and should
be selected according to the expected speed, motion style,
required level of the tracking accuracy and available tracking
budget.
III. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
A. Hardware
The server consists of a PC, microcontroller, and a GSM
shield. The minimum requirement for the PC is to have a
serial port to communicate with the microcontroller (Arduino
UNO-R3). This microcontroller is attached to the GSM shield,
where the SIM900 module from SIMCOM is used. In
addition, the mobile device used in this work should be a
smart device (smart phone) with Android operating system
and a built in GPS module.
B. Software
The implemented system operates in two modes, namely,
manual and periodic. In the manual mode the server sends a
single location request SMS message to each mobile unit. In
response, each mobile unit will reply by an SMS including its
position coordinates and the system stops, as shown in Fig.1.

In order to reduce the total cost of SMS messages in the Server Mobile units
SMS
periodic tracking mode, it is proposed to reduce the number of
response messages sent by the moving units to the server
during Tobs for a given T. The idea is that a moving unit
should not send a position information SMS to the server if the
distance moved during the last T minutes is less than a given Update GPS reading
threshold. The Android application program is written such
that when the time of SMS response message comes (every T
minutes after receiving the position request SMS from the
server), the program calculates the difference in distance
Identify node
between the current coordinates and the coordinates of the last
sent SMS. If the difference is greater or equal to the threshold Display location date
distance, then a new position SMS will be sent. Otherwise, the
program does nothing and waits to the next T seconds. By
applying this scheme, the total number of SMS messages and
their cost should decrease in the periodic tracking mode. This
reduction depends on the motion style of the moving units and Fig. 1. Manual operation protocol
the correct selection of suitable T and threshold distance
values, which are also related to the tracking accuracy. The Whereas, in the periodic mode the server sends a location
proposed scheme perfectly distinguishes between the motion request SMS message to each mobile unit and in response, the
and stopping condition of the mobile units. It eliminates the mobile units will send their coordinate information to the
need for transmitting SMS message in the case of actual server continuously every a predetermined time period, as
stopping and moving a short distance (less than threshold). shown in Fig.2. The software of the implemented system
However, the value of the threshold distance affects the consists of three main parts as follows:
accuracy of monitoring and tracking the moving object. That is,
if a short threshold distance is selected, and the mobile unit
mostly exceeds this threshold every T, then the monitoring
accuracy is high and the used number of SMS messages
approaches the original case of zero threshold. Resulting in a
slight reduction in cost. But, if the threshold is large enough
such that the moving unit rarely exceeds this threshold every T,
then in this case a significant reduction in SMS cost is
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 2018 International Conference on Advanced Science and Engineering (ICOASE), Kurdistan Region, Iraq

Server SMS Mobile units

Update GPS reading

Update GPS reading

Identify node

Display location date

Update GPS reading

Identify node
Fig. 3. Implemented server GUI
Display location date

Start

Fig. 2. Periodic operation protocol

Power on
1. Server program
Fig. 3 shows the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the
implemented tracking system, which is programed using Initialize Microcontroller and
GSM
VB.NET. This interface enables the user (observer) to initiate
a position request SMS and then determine the position of a
No
mobile object on the map. It consists of a field to display the GSM Validation
map, two combo boxes to select the serial port and the baud
rate, and two radio buttons to select the operation modes Yes
(manual or periodic). The GUI also consists of a track bar to Send ‘1’ or ‘3’ to smartphone(s)
zoom the map and six buttons in which the first one is used to (AT+CMGS=”009XXXXX”)
enable/disable the connection and the second one is used to
turn the system ON and OFF. The other three buttons are used
to select the map type (Live maps, Satellite or Terrain). The Delay
sixth button is the exit button. If the manual mode is selected
the microcontroller is reset and a code ‘1’ is transmitted from
PC to the microcontroller which sends it to the mobile object No Reply SMS
as an SMS through the GSM shield. If the periodic mode is received
selected the microcontroller is reset and a code other than ’1’
(say ’3’) is sent to determine this mode. This code is also used Yes
to determine the SMS repetition time period in this case T=3
minutes. A stop control SMS is available to the observer at the Send received SMS to PC

server to stop the continuous position SMS messages coming

from all or some of the moving units in the periodic operation
mode. Moreover, in both manual and periodic modes, the
server archives the received positions of the moving units in a
file tagged with time and date information for future analysis.
2. Microcontroller program
The microcontroller is programmed using the Micro C
programming language to enable the communication between
the PC and the GSM shield. In both manual and periodic
modes, the microcontroller encapsulates the code that comes
from the PC, in an SMS form and sends it to the intended
smart phone that is identified by its number. Then, the
microcontroller waits for the response SMS. The flowchart of
the microcontroller program is shown in Fig.4.
258
Fig. 4. Microcontroller program flowchart
3. Android Application
A ‘.apk’ application program is developed in this work
using Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
This application program continuously measures the GPS
coordinates of the smart phone. When a position request SMS
is received, the application program checks the identification
number (ID) of the sender. If it is a not valid server ID, then
the message is ignored. Otherwise, the program extracts the
embedded code. If the code is ‘1’, then the manual operation
mode is identified. In this case the application program
encapsulates the current GPS information (longitude and
 2018 International Conference on Advanced Science and Engineering (ICOASE), Kurdistan Region, Iraq

latitude) in an SMS and sends it to the server. If the received as shown in Fig.6.
code is not ‘1’, then the periodic operation mode is identified. The horizontal axis in Fig.6 is the observation time, Tobs
In this case the application program sends its GPS information = 3 hours, ticked at every 5 minutes which is the assumed
to the server periodically every T minutes as long as it is time of sending a position SMS message to the server. With
respect to the vertical axis at the left hand side, each point
necessary to do so, where T equals the received code and it is
represents the average speed of the truck in km/h for the
selected by the observer. For example, when the received code previous T minutes. For instance, the average speed is 90
is ‘5’, then T=5 minutes and a position information SMS is km/h for the last 5 minutes of the first hour from the
transmitted to the server every 5 minutes if a distance greater beginning of the observation. Having the speed is variable,
than a given threshold, dTH, (e.g. 4 km) has been moved away then the distance, 𝑑, travelled within each T will also be
from the last sent coordinates. If the moved distance is less variable, and it is calculated by
than the threshold value, then there is no need to update the
𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑑(km/h) 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑑(km/h)
position information and therefore no SMS is transmitted to 𝑑= = =12× 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑑 (3)
𝑇 5 𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑢𝑡𝑒
the server at this time. The same procedure is applied every T
minutes until a ‘stop’ control SMS is received from the server. The vertical axis at the right hand side of Fig.6 shows 𝑑
The flowchart of the application program is shown in Fig.5. values. Now, if the original (classical) periodic tracking
protocol is used, then the mobile unit will send a position
information SMS to the server every 5 minutes regardless
Start
whether this is necessary or not. The classical protocol will
transmit 36 such SMS messages during the observation time.
The total price in this case is 38×25 = 950 IQD. The two
No additional messages are the position request and stop
GPS ON message from the server.
Yes
100 8.33
Read coordinates 90 7.5
Longitude &
latitude 80 6.66
70 5.83
Speed (km/h)

60 5

d (km)
No Server 50 4.16
GSM 40 3.33
SIM T=received code 30 2.5
20 1.66
Yes
10 0.8

Received No While received code ≠ 0

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37
code = ’1’ ‘stop’ update GPS Time index x5 (minutes)
information and send
location coordinate to Fig. 6. Truck speed profile
Yes
server via SMS message
every T minutes if Whereas, if the proposed periodic tracking protocol is
Send location
coordinates to
moved distance > dTH used with a threshold distance of dTH =4 km, about 3% of the
server via SMS total path length, then a position SMS message is transmitted
only if a distance greater than 4 km is travelled after the
previous sent position SMS. In this case, only the points in
Fig.6 marked with a circle will be sent to the server. Then,
Fig. 5. Flowchart of Android application the total number of SMS messages needed to track the truck
is reduced to (23+2), with a cost of only 652 IQD.
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION A threshold distance of 4 km is an acceptable value for
In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed cost tracking vehicles moving over large geographical areas.
reduction scheme, two periodic tracking scenarios are However, greater values of the dTH result in more reduction in
discussed with the assumptions that T = 5 minutes and CSMS the number and cost of SMS messages, but the tracking
= 25 IQD. Without loss of generality, a single moving unit is accuracy will decrease. That is, a dTH of 8 km can save more
considered in the following analysis. cost but it will be more difficult to determine the exact
position of the vehicle. There will be an uncertainty circle of
radius 8 km around the position obtained by the system.
1. Scenario 1 Therefore, the suitable value of dTH is determined by the
This is a hypothetical case in which a moving truck is designer according to the specific tracking case accuracy
assumed to travel a distance of 142.2 km with a speed profile requirement and affordable cost. Table I shows the number of
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 2018 International Conference on Advanced Science and Engineering (ICOASE), Kurdistan Region, Iraq

SMS messages and total cost for different values of dTH for vehicle with a 63.8% reduction in SMS total cost with respect
this hypothetical scenario. to the classical tracking protocol.

TABLE I. EFFECT OF DTH ON SMS NUMBER AND COST IN SCENARIO 1

TABLE II. EFFECT OF DTH ON SMS NUMBER AND COST IN SCENARIO 2
dTH Number of Total SMS Percentage saving in
(km) used SMSs cost (IQD) total price
0 38 950 0% dTH Number of Total SMS Percentage saving in
(km) used SMSs cost (IQD) total price
2 29 725 23.7%
0 47 1175 0%
4 24 600 36.8%
2 39 975 17%
6 20 500 47.4%
4 31 775 34%
8 14 350 63.2%
6 24 600 49%
8 21 525 55.3%
10 17 425 63.8%
2. Scenario 2
This is an actual practical case, in which the motion of an
ordinary vehicle is tracked along its trip starting from Kirkuk
City, passing through Erbil city till it's arrival at Mosul City.
The trip path is about 214.3 km long. It took 3 hours and 45
minutes, i.e., 255 minutes observation time. The classical
periodic mode is activated in order to record the GPS
coordinates of the moving vehicle every 5 minutes. It resulted
in 45 readings. Then, there are 47 SMS messages (1 position
request + 45 response +1 stop SMS). The total cost is 47×25 =
1175 IQD. The distance, d, travelled within each T minutes is
variable because the speed of the vehicle is not constant over
this long path. This distance is calculated from the GPS
coordinates, as shown in Fig.7 by using the Haversine distance
(a)
equation [10].
12

11

10

9
Differential distance (km)

0 (b)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
Time index x5 (minutes)

Fig. 7. Distance travelled in each T minutes

Then, for a given level of accuracy, it is not necessary to

transmit all of the 45 position information messages. For
example, for dTH of 4 km, which is about 1.8% of the total of
travelled path, then the number of SMS messages is reduced
to 24 and the cost is reduced to 600 IQD. Table II shows the
reduction in number and cost of SMS messages for other
values of dTH. As the threshold distance increases, more
reduction in the total cost is achieved. But this reduction is at
the expense of tracking accuracy. Therefore, the maximum
dTH that provide the required level of accuracy should be (c)
selected to maximize the reduction in the number of used SMS Fig. 8. Effect of dTH on tracking accuracy
messages and hence their cost. The effect of some dTH values
on tracking accuracy is illustrated in Fig.8. It can be noted that (a) dTH=0 km, (b) dTH=4 km, (c) dTH=10 km
the proposed system with dTH up to 10 km is still capable of
providing an acceptably accurate tracking to the path of the

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