Enhanced Mechanisms for Navigation and Tracking Services in Smart Phones

Abstract

Combining Global Positioning System (GPS) and Short Message Service (SMS), this paper develops a realisticsystem, called Mobile Navigation and Tracking System (MNTS), to provide navigation and target tracking services.MNTS is an Android based mobile application which integrated many enhanced mechanisms for navigation andtarget tracking services. MNTS not only provides users with the GPS navigation capability, but also supports QuickResponse (QR) code decoding, nearby scenic spot searching, friend positioning and target tracking. In targettracking, MNTS utilizing SMS mainly adopts two proposed novel approaches: location prediction and dynamicthreshold to reduce the number of short message transmissions while maintaining location accuracy within anacceptable range. Location prediction utilizes the current target’s location, moving speed, bearing to predict its nextlocation. When the distance between the predicted location and the actual location exceeds a threshold, the targetsends a short message to the tracker to update the actual location. Based on the movement speed of the target,the threshold is dynamically adjusted to balance the location accuracy and the number of short messages.Furthermore, as MNTS is free and open-source software, service providers or developers can easily extend theirown services based on this system.