Data Optimization in GPS Tracking

Question

I'm building a real-time GPS tracking system. The mobile client continuously sends location data to server and updates the location data of tracking objects every 15 seconds. My biggest problem is that the cost of battery and internet is very high.

Is there any solution thats help optimizing data transfer between client and server ?

Answer 1

You know that you have a good solution when you reach 2-3 bytes per GPS position with 4-5 attributes (time, lat, lon, optionally speed, heading)

Try to avoid security, this destroys all attempts to reduce data size. The ammount of bytes that the security (signatures, headers, keys) uses is far more than that of the GPS Data packet.

Is there any solution thats help optimizing data transfer between client and server ?

Yes, at least some tipps: Do not use XML, that blows up your data by a fatcor of 100 to 1000. Use a binary protocol. A WSDL Web Service ar not well suited for this task, too.

The less frequent the device need to communicate the better the chances to get more fixes per kbytes.
An uncompressed position: needs 12 bytes: time (4), latitude (4), longitude (4).

Different companies have differnt solution to compress the data. I know one patented solution, and one confident. More I cannot tell you.

Battery
If you disable the screen, you can record 8 hours of one per second positions on an iphone4.