Internet of Things-based Vehicle Tracking and Monitoring System

Vehicles play an integral part in the life of a human being by facilitating in everyday tasks. The major concern that arises with this fact is that the rate of vehicle thefts have increased exponentially and retrieving them becomes almost impossible as the responsible party completely alters the stolen vehicles, leaving them untraceable. Ultimately, tracking and monitoring of vehicles using on-vehicle sensors is a promising and an efficient solution. The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to play a vital role in revolutionizing the Security and Safety industry through a system of sensor networks by periodically sending the data from the sensors to the cloud for storage, from where it can be accessed to view or take any necessary actions (if required). The main contributions of this paper are the implementation and results of the prototype of a vehicle tracking and monitoring system. The system comprises of an Arduino UNO board connected to the Global Positioning System (GPS) module, Neo-6M, which senses the exact location of the vehicle in the form of latitude and longitude, and the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, which sends the data to the Application Programming Interface (API) Cloud service, ThingSpeak, for storage and analyzing. An Android based mobile application is developed that utilizes the stored data from the Cloud and presents the user with the findings. Results show that the prototype is not only simple and cost effective, but also efficient and can be readily used by everyone from all walks of life to protect their vehicles.