Vehicle Tracking Technology Trends

Market embracing of vehicle tracking systems is spreading fast, majority of commercial vehicles in North America and Europe already using the technology, and active growth occurring in Asian and emerging markets. A recent market study showed that the global vehicle tracking market will grow from $10.91 billion in 2013 to $30.45 billion by 2018, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.8%.

Some of the driving factors for introduction of vehicle tracking for both commercial and private vehicles are here under:

Downsizing of tracking units and antenna allowing covert mounting and installation in smaller enclosures
Security: theft detection and tracing of shipped goods
Minimizing of logistics costs: Enhanced routing, optimization utilization of stock level, and improved operational monitoring.
Promote of insurance claims based on accident re-construction using docked position, direction, speed and acceleration data.
Providing a better service: real-time and previous positional reporting
Expedite stolen goods/vehicle recovery
Prevention of fuel theft
Government authorization to include tracking technology in new vehicles
Abating cost and size, and increasing performance of satellite positioning receivers and cellular modems
Driver management and tracking of driving behavior
Longer battery life and solar powered devices, especially applicable to vehicle tracking devices with no connection to the vehicle power supply

Requirements:

There are several hardware issues when addressing the above mentioned scenarios:

Congeniality with multiple Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) systems

GPS is no more the only global steering satellite system available. The Russian GLONASS is now fully operational, the Chinese BeiDou and Japanese QZSS systems are partially viable, and the EU Galileo system will be available by 2019. Prerequisite for compatibility with these systems vary from single-system to multiple system compliance, either one at a time or with parallel functionality.

Image courtesy: u-blox

These requirements are imposed by where a tracking application will be used: weak signal environments where satellites appear low on the horizon may constrain parallel GNSS operation. Government authorization is also a consideration; in Russia, for example, the ERA-GLONASS vehicle emergency call system requires GLONASS compatibility. A similar situation exists in China with BeiDou.

Performance requirements may require vehicle tracking systems that are consistent with multiple GNSS systems concurrently: access to more satellites results in faster time to fix and more reliable operation, particularly in high-rise cities.

Services in range with destitute satellite reception

GNSS satellites is critical to calculate a position for tracking applications, visibility of. With GPS/GNSS satellites transferred with a power of about 30 watts from a an extension of 20 thousand kilometers, and the preliminary to lock onto 4 satellites, tracing achievement and certainty can become debased in urban canyons, when indoors (e.g. inside warehouses, rail stations, park houses), or when the receiver is within metallic containers. For tracking applications, this issue can be dispatched via several techniques:

Unified dead estimating: Reinforcing GNSS receivers with censor data that reports distance and heading changes from the last known position. This is materialized in automotive navigation systems to support smooth navigation within tunnels. Accelerometer readings can also be enhanced positioning within multi-level park houses or stacked highways by taking into account vertical displacement.

Compound positioning procedure for indoor positioning: Adding a second parallel system that can conjecture situation based on other characteristics such as visible mobile or Wi-Fi cells adds an additional measure of security when GNSS satellite visibility is blocked: even an approximate location within a few hundred meters, or even a few kilometers is preferable to no positional information at all, especially when it comes to valuable shipments and vehicles.

Congeniality with multiple cellular standards

on the GSM/GPRS (2G) standard for tracking devices was easy as it has been consistently ratify globally. GSM/GPRS, however, is falling chase to next-generation 3G standards, specifically UMTS/HSPA, CDMA2000 (in the USA) and LTE, all of which are not uniformly deployed around the world. Specifically, there are many regional variants of 3G and 4G standards that operate over different frequency bands.

Nested modem PCB design is important for creating regional variants of a tracking device, and to allow for future upgrades. Pictured: u-blox SARA, LISA and TOBY modules supporting GSM, UMTS and LTE

This highlights the desirability of cellular modems that support different standards (GSM, UMTS, CDMA, LTE) while retaining footprint compatibility on the same PCB layout. This reduces hardware costs when designing tracking systems with regional variants, or upgrading to the next-generation tracking technology (ex. 2G to 3G upgrade).

Automotive grade components

Lastly, but equally important to all aspects discussed previously, vehicle tracking applications require automotive grade components. As “automotive grade” is a relative term whose definition is different depending on manufacturers and end-customers, at the very minimum modem and GNSS components (and all other electronic components in the design) should qualified according to AEC‑Q100, manufactured in ISO/TS 16949 certified sites, and fully tested at the factory on a system level. Qualification tests should be performed as stipulated in the ISO16750 standard: “Road vehicles – Environmental conditions and testing for electrical and electronic equipment”.

Conclusion

Vehicle tracking is becoming a defacto requirement for private, commercial and public transportation. As both GNSS and cellular technologies are in a constant state of flux, it is important to design tracking systems that address regional satellite and cellular compatibility, positioning in areas where satellite visibility is degraded or absent, ease of hardware variants and upgrade, suppression of radio inference and conforming to automotive quality requirements.

Due to the long-life expected of vehicle tracking devices, as well as reliable performance over large geographical areas, it is best to base designs not only on the current state of the technology, but also on the expected lifetime of the system.