Cooperative Smartphone Tracking System: Software Design and Implementation

  • PDF / 4,490,208 Bytes
  • 21 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
  • 53 Downloads / 205 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Cooperative Smartphone Tracking System: Software Design and Implementation Yousef Ali1 · Uthman Baroudi1  Received: 25 June 2020 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2020

Abstract Mobile applications have been increasingly adopted in monitoring and tracking systems such as health tracking systems for elderly and chronic patients. Due to the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, using smartphones in such tracking systems would be time and cost-effective. However, the limited battery capacity in smartphones could cause an interruption in reporting the tracking information, especially when users spend a long time without recharging batteries. Continuous tracking could be critically important, especially for the elderly and patients with serious illnesses. In this paper, we develop a mobile application for Android smartphones that report the location and health information cooperatively using the CEET clustering protocol. On the server-side, we exploited the Google Firebase real database that receives the users’ tracking information and can notify the data changes within milliseconds. We present a performance evaluation of the system through real experiments using the developed application. The results show the outstanding performance of the proposed approach in reducing the tracking energy (by around 55%). The developed app does not require any modification neither to the manufacturing specifications of the smartphones nor to the established wireless environment. The user just needs to install the app to his/ her smartphones using apk file or from the Google play. Keywords  Cooperative clustering · Energy efficiency · Hybrid networks · Bluetooth–WiFi networks · Large scale tracking networks

Introduction Real-time tracking systems have drawn significant attention from the research community since they have a wide variety of applications that influence human lives, such as continuous monitoring of patients, elderly persons, crowds, etc. With the technological advances in smartphones, growing numbers of smartphones are incorporating positioning services. It becomes much easier to track the location and status of people accurately in a large scale. Different positioning technologies can be used nowadays by smartphones for positioning. The quality of positioning in these techniques differs in terms of positioning accuracy, response time, and energy consumption. The level of positioning accuracy and response time can be determined according to the application requirements. However, the techniques that provide a * Uthman Baroudi [email protected]; [email protected] 1



Computer Engineering Department, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

high level of positioning accuracy like GPS require generally higher power consumption; this may cause a problem, especially for applications that require continuous location updates, and they have power supply limitations. A tracking system using smartphones is an excellent example of such applications.