Aspicore GSM Tracker is an S60 application, which makes the smartphone into a real-time AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location) tracking device.The application determines the location with a built-in GPS (or Bluetooth GPS receiver) and transmits the tracking data to a server in real-time through a cellular packet data connection.
System description and purpose Typically server stores the received tracking data into a SQL database. The data can be visualized with simple map software, (e.g. Google Earth) or it can be linked to a professional fleet management system or a mobile workforce management system.
Individual users can use Aspicore GSM Tracker for personal location tracking. They can e.g. automatically publish their current location and daily track on their web page. They can recover a lost GPS phone through an SMS enquiry.
Advantages Communication is fast and reliable and costs are low, because the application uses packet data transfer technology and a very compact messaging protocol. The latency between the actual GPS position fix and data receive event in the server is normally only a few seconds.
The locations obtained are accurate, because the system uses a real GPS, not network based positioning.
You do not need to pay monthly fee or per-transaction fee for the location requests.
The mobile hardware installation is very easy.
Features You don't even need necessarily to have as many GPS receivers as tracked mobile phones, if a lower accuracy suffices and there are only a few places or standard routes you want to have recognised. The location of the mobile phone can also be determined by the network cell id.
You can configure the timers and events, which trigger the data send action. Usually the data is sent in a compact UDP datagram, only a little over 100 packet data bytes per message. This means that the data transfer costs are minimal compared to e.g. SMS.
Location tracking system The central database can be a powerful SQL engine, which handles hundreds of mobile tracking targets. The database accumulates position data from the mobile phones being tracked. Each record in the database is identified by the IMEI code of the phone the data belongs to.
If you are not using a GPS receiver, you must first create a mapping from the network cell ID to a geographical location. Unless you get the cell id location lists from your mobile operator, you can collect the data yourself by driving around the places you want to have recognised by the system and have Aspicore GSM Tracker and a GPS receiver to record the latitude and longitude of the network cells.
When the system is eventually being used, the mobile will report its network cell information to the system server by using Aspicore GSM Tracker. The server compares the network cell information to the accumulated data and converts it to an estimated geographical location. This way you can track your sales representatives, delivery men, children etc without them needing to carry a GPS receiver with them.
How to evaluate? The central database solution is not included, but customers can use Aspicore's test server in the Internet for evaluation and testing. The test server can also be used to evaluate the network cell based positioning. Collect first the cell locations along your daily routes with a Bluetooth GPS and then try positioning without a GPS receiver! This is a more affordable and a real-time alternative to operator based mobile phone positioning.
Server interface and tools Aspicore GSM Tracker sends data to the server as plain ASCII characters in an UDP datagram or a TCP message. You can write the receiving end program yourself by using IP sockets, if you wish. You are free to use the sample Perl scripts or Java code to process the UDP datagrams and store them to a MySQL database. See Aspicore's web site. Http data can be processed as shown in our PHP and ASP samples. There is a freeware Windows .NET PC utility to receive NMEA datagrams via UDP and send them to a standard GPS mapping program through a COM port.
Aspicore Ltd is willing to provide you with the data collection database server software or to assist you to integrate the Aspicore GSM Tracker solution into your enterprise system. Refer to Aspicore web site for a demo of smartphone real time location data integrated with Microsoft MapPoint .NET Web Service.
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