Advanced Tracking of Vehicles

With the continued advances in wireless communications, geo-location technologies, and consumer electronics, it is becoming possible to accurately track the time-varying location of each vehicle in a population of vehicles. This paper reports on ongoing research that has as it objective to develop efficient tracking techniques. More specifically, while almost all commercially available tracking solutions simply offer time-based sampling of positions, this paper’s techniques aim to offer a guaranteed tracking accuracy for each vehicle at the lowest possible costs, in terms of network traffic and serverside updates. This is achieved by designing, prototyping, and testing novel tracking techniques that exploit knowledge of the road network and past movement. These resulting tracking techniques are to support mobile services that rely on the existence of a central server that continuously tracks the current positions of vehicles.