IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY, VOL.

70, 2022
4th on Advances in Electrical Engineering 28-30 September, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Smart Anti-Theft Vehicle Tracking System for

Bangladesh based on Internet of Things
Mohammad Salah Uddin Md. Mohiuddin Ahmed1, Jannat Binta Alam2, and Maruf Islam3
Department of Computer Control and Management Engineering “A. Ruberti” Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy East West University, Bangladesh
uddin@dis.uniroma1.it {sumon13mp1, jannat1ruma2, ggezmaruf3}@gmail.com

Abstract—With the emergence of new technology and It works like an emergency stop button to stop the vehicle
innovations, people are searching smarter ways to protect/monitor remotely if needed at any time. Moreover, A RFID [2], [3]
their properties remotely. In accordance to that, at present GPS based driver authentication system is added to provide an extra
based tracking system is frequently used in vehicle tracking, layer of security.
children/pet tracking, aircraft tracking, any personal belongings
tracking, fleet management and so on. This paper introduces a
Smart Anti-Theft Vehicle System based on Internet of Things
(IoT) for monitoring the movement of any equipped vehicle from
anywhere in real time. At the implementation of this system,
Global Positioning System (GPS), Global System for Mobile
Communication (GSM)/General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)
and Microcontrollers are used to enable users for monitoring their
vehicles in a convenient manner. This system provides the access
to check the movement and control (emergency stop by closing the
fuel line) vehicles remotely by using mobile application. The
hardware prototype of the proposed system and the user
application for monitoring and controlling vehicles are presented
in this paper.

Keywords—Vehicle tracker, Embedded Systems, GSM/GPRS,

GPS, IoT, Sensors, Mobile Apps, Amazon web-service, IoT-cloud,
LinkItOne, Location tracking etc.

I. INTRODUCTION Fig. 1: The block diagram of proposed system.

Vehicle tracking systems were first introduced by the We organized the paper as follows: The Literature Review
shipping company because they need to know the position of is presented in Section II. The Section III which refers to some
the shipping vehicles in a given time. Nowadays, Vehicle recent works related to Vehicle Tracking System. In Section IV,
tracking system is used for tracking the vehicle location in real details of the proposed system is provided. The experimental
time. description is elaborated in Section V and lastly, the paper is
concluded through a Conclusion given in Section VI.
In our country, every month, more than 140 car/motorcycle
theft complain are reported to police [1]. Most of them are either
not recovered or disclosed which is becoming a major problem II. LITERATURE REVIEW
for us. Without the location information of vehicles, finding a
lost or stolen car/motorcycle is very challenging for law- A. What is Internet of Things (IoT)
enforcement agency and it’s a time consuming process. The Internet of Things is the connected network between
According to the Dhaka Metropolitan police (DMP) [1], vehicle devices (wearable, portable and house-held devices etc.), which
thieves usually sell a vehicle part by part which is more easier was first proposed by Prof. Aston while performing the research
than selling the whole vehicle. Sometimes they change the related to Radio-frequency identification (RFID) in 1999. The
identification information of vehicles such as chassis and service composition is fully supported by IoT with various
engine number, and then sell the vehicle to others. In this case, applications. The communication among millions of devices
fleet information of vehicle is needed to find a vehicle within a (any type of internet connected) are possible through IoT. The
short time. Three Layer Architecture (most popular) is illustrated in Fig. 2.
In this paper, we are presenting an Anti-theft Vehicle The layers are: Perception, Network and Application Layer.
Tracking System based on Internet of Things (IoT). It allows Sensors, Actuators, Proximity tags (RFID, NFC etc.) and other
users to track the location of their vehicles in real time from emended devices are connected to the IoT via Perception layer.
anywhere. A control switch is provided for turning on/off the Network layer establish the communications between Things
fuel line of vehicles which is efficient when it’s an emergency. and human. User interface/applications are

978-1-5386-0869-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 624

provided by Application layer. More details specifications and B. Vehicle Fuel System
applications domain of IoT are nicely listed on [4 –7]. The function of the vehicle fuel system (see Fig. 3) is to
store and supply fuel to the engine. The engine intake system
(details in [8–9]) is where the fuel is mixed with air, atomized,
and vaporized. Then it can be compressed in the engine cylinder
and ignited to produce energy or power.

Fig. 2: Three-layer architecture of IoT.

Terms and Basic Definitions: Fig. 3: Typical Vehicle Fuel System(left) and a Fuel Pump(right) [10].

• Internet of Things (IoT): A network of Internet The fuel is stored in the fuel tank and the fuel pump is
connected devices (electrical) able to interchange data responsible for flowing the fuel from the tank. The fuel then
between them using sensors and actuators. travels through the fuel lines and is delivered to the fuel
• IoT device: Any type of electrical Internet connected injectors. When the fuel is delivered, the final conditions for
device/s that can be monitored and/or controlled providing complete combustion are atomization and the spray
through Internet from anywhere(remote location). pattern of the fuel. More details about vehicle fuel system is
illustrated on [11–13]. Fuel generates the power and the power
• IoT ecosystem: All the components that enable moves the car. The engine unable to generate any power if fuel
consumers, governments and businesses to connect pump refuses to draw the fuel.
with their IoT devices, including remotes, networks,
dashboards, gateways, storage, analytics and security. III. RELATED WORKS
• Entity: Mainly includes the users of IoT system such Vehicle tracking systems are widely used throughout the
as consumers, governments and businesses etc. world in different sectors such as smart traffic management
• The Physical layer: The physical components system, vehicle location tracking systems, Anti-theft vehicle
(hardware) that makes an Internet of Things (IoT) tracking systems, parking management systems, fleet
device which includes sensors, actuators and management, and in the field of Intelligent Transportation
networking gear. Systems (ITS) or Smart transportation systems.

• The Network layer: The main duty of network layer A. Bus Tracking System
is transmitting the data collected from physical layer A fixed route, simple bus tracking system has been proposed
to IoT devices. by Lau in [14]. The system used a smartphone application and
• The Application layer: All the protocols and LED display panel for displaying the location after a specific
interfaces used by the connected devices for time interval. The system is very useful for college/university
identification and communication. students who attend classes in big campuses. As a result, they
(students) can spend more time in studying, sleeping or relaxing
• Dashboard: The dashboard is used for visualizing the rather than wasting time through waiting for a bus. Nowadays,
information about the Internet of Things ecosystem. It almost all the European countries are using similar type of
also used for controlling the IoT ecosystem. It acts as tracking system for public transportation.
a special type of remote control for IoT.
• Analytics: Software systems that analyze the data B. Anti-Theft Tracking System based on GSM/GPRS
generated by IoT connected devices. The analysis can Unauthorized access of any valuable devices/properties can
be used for a different purposes, such as predictive be prevented by using Anti-Theft Tracking System. Ramadan
maintenance. and Al-Kheder in [15] presented a prototype design of a vehicle
tracking and anti-theft system for protecting a vehicle from any
• Storage for IoT: The cloud storage/data bucket, intruder by using GPRS/GSM technology. The system used
where data from IoT devices are stored temporary or Kalman filter [16] for minimizing the positional (GPS
permanently . coordinates) errors, due to week GPS signal. An abstract idea
• The Networks: The Internet communication layer for controlling the vehicle’s ignition also proposed there
that enables the entity to communicate with their without proper implementation details. A notebook with
embedded devices, and enables devices to Google Earth is used for monitoring the vehicle’s location and
communicate with each other.

625
its status. A Google maps based Smartphone application would IoT devices. The board is based on MediaTek MT2502A SoC
be another alternative to replace the task that the notebook microcontroller. Some other sensors and module such as
performs. Fig. 4 shows the architectural view of that system. GSM/GPRS module, GPS sensor, SD cards, Bluetooth 2.1 and
4.0 as well as Wi-Fi and GNSS are also embedded with this
development board. More details specifications of LinkIt ONE
board are available in [28]. In summary, it’s an all-in-one
compact high performance embedded board for prototyping
various devices.

Fig. 6: The circuit diagram (left) and dataflow diagram (right) of in-vehicle
device.
Fig. 4: Architectural view of Vehicle Tracking and Anti-Theft System [15].

C. Finder Vehicle Tracking System

Finder [17] is one of the popular Global Positioning System
(GPS) based tracking system commercially available in
Bangladesh. The device consists of GPS sensors, GSM/GPRS
module together embedded on a microcontroller. According to Fig. 7: Required hardware components for in-vehicle device.
their news portal [17], some stolen vehicle has been recovered
by using their tracking system. They use On-Board Diagnostics
(OBD) [18] technique for monitoring the condition of the B. In-Vehicle Device
vehicle. The benchmark of the system and more technical Our In-vehicle device consists of a microcontroller along
details are not currently available due to their business policy. with other sensors such as GPS (for collecting location data),
A geographical map based mobile application has been GPRS shield (establish connection with IoT-cloud), a relay
developed (recently) for monitoring the vehicles location. A switch (for controlling the fuel pump) and RFID reader for
typical type of OBD-based vehicle tracking system is illustrated driver authentication. A Radio frequency based proximity card
in Fig. 5. is used here for turning on the fuel pump (works as a fuel supply
switch) before start the vehicle. Without this proximity card, no
one can open the fuel line. This provides an extra layer of
security. Drivers must use this proximity card before start the
vehicle. All the required hardware used in this system are given
in Fig.7 and Fig. 6 shows the block diagram of our system. A
Mobile SIM module with data connection is mandatory for
Internet connection. The dataflow diagram of in- vehicle device
is shown in Fig. 6. A source code to control and coordinate them
(all sensors data and other activities) is written using high level
Arduino programming language, successfully compiled and
then uploaded into the microcontrollers memory.

C. Mobile Application
Fig. 5: A typical OBD based vehicle tracking system [19]. We have developed a geographical or Google maps based
mobile application that collects the location data from IoT-
Some other embedded system or Arduino microcontroller cloud and visualize them in real time. As a result, the users can
based vehicle tracking system are presented in [20–27]. track the location of their vehicle in real time through the
Mobile application. A virtual control switch for fuel pump is
IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM also added with our application which is responsible for turning
on/off the fuel pump. The virtual control switch allows users to
A. LinkIt ONE Development Board control the fuel line of the vehicle, that forces the vehicle to stop
The LinkIt ONE development board (Fig.10) is used as the within a minute (due to the absence of fuel supply). The
main control board of our proposed system. It’s an open source, dataflow diagram and the screenshot of the application are
high-performance board for prototyping Wearable and illustrated in Fig. 8. Geo-fence [29] based real

626
time push notification system is also included with the A push notification(see Fig.9) was invoked on the in-vehicle
application; that notifies the users while the vehicle crosses the device which informs the crossing of the user defined geo-
geo-fence defined by users. fence. The snapshot of the test result of our prototype system is
demonstrated in Fig. 9. Our system is easily integrate with any
vehicle without major modification of the vehicle fuel system.
A brief comparison with existing system is elaborated in
Table.1.

TABLE I. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING SYSTEM (WITH RESPECT TO

BANGLADESH)

Our System Finder and Others

Tracking/ Monitoring YES YES
Fuel Line Control YES NO
Driver Authorization YES NO
Location logging YES YES

Cost Effective YES NO

VI. CONCLUSION
Vehicle theft is one of the major problem of our country and
technology is always helping us for solving problems. With the
growth of ICT in Digital Bangladesh, it is obvious for us to
introduce more and more smart solution for our everyday life.
Fig. 8: The Mobile application and dataflow diagram of the user application. A smart anti-theft vehicle tracking system is presented in this
work. The hardware design and development of our tracking
V. EXPERIMENTS system has been described in this paper. Some sensors such as
We have developed a prototype of the system shown in Fig. (GPS, GPRS/GSM module, NFC etc.) along with
11. Amazon web-service [30] is used as a cloud platform of our microcontroller are used for developing in-vehicle device. A
system. IBM Bluemix [31], Google Cloud IoT [32] or any other Smartphone application has been developed for visualizing the
IoT-cloud platform can also be used. A battery powered water location of the vehicle on geographical maps. The system
motor has been used as fuel pump of the vehicle. It flows the fuel perfectly tracks the location of vehicles and perfectly controls
when power is on. The control switch is mainly responsible for the fuel lines anytime from anywhere. We hope that, Our
powering the water motor. The RFID based authentication Internet of Things based proposed system will help owner to
switch (fuel pump switch) also turns on the water pump when protect their vehicles against theft in a smart way.
it touches the RFID reader. A smartphone was configured with
the developed application that successfully visualizes the GPS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
location coming from in- vehicle device through IoT-cloud in
This work is acknowledged to all members of IoT Bangladesh
real time.
group. Also, please allow us to dedicate our acknowledgment
to Dr. Shamim H Ripon, Associate Professor of East
West University, Bangladesh for his most support and
encouragement.
REFERENCES
[1] “Dhaka Metropolitan Police,” http://www.dmp.gov.bd, 2014, [Online;
accessed 6-May-2017].
[2] K. Finkenzeller and R. Handbook, “Radio-frequency identification
fundamentals and applications,” Chippenham: John Wiley & Son, 1999.
[3] S. Shepard, RFID: radio frequency identification. McGraw Hill
Professional, 2005.
[4] A. Whitmore, A. Agarwal, and L. Da Xu, “The internet of things—a
survey of topics and trends,” Information Systems Frontiers, vol. 17, no.
2, pp. 261–274, 2015.
[5] S. Li, L. D. Xu, and S. Zhao, “The internet of things: a survey,”
Information Systems Frontiers, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 243–259, 2015.
[6] GSMA, “Gsma: The impact of the internet of things - the connected
home,” KRC RESEARCH, Tech. Rep., 2012.
[7] “What is the Internet of Things? WIRED explains,” http://www.wired.co.
uk/article/internet-of-things-what-is-explained-iot, 2016, [Online;
Fig. 9: The snapshot of the application. accessed 16-June-2017].

627
[8] A. V. Willgoos, “Engine intake system,” Nov. 23 1937, US Patent [21] M. M. Rahman, J. R. Mou, K. Tara, and M. I. Sarkar, “Real time google
2,099,785. map and arduino based vehicle tracking system,” in Electrical, Computer
& Telecommunication Engineering (ICECTE), International Conference
[9] M. Hitomi and H. Oda, “Engine intake system,” Oct. 1 1985, US Patent on. IEEE, 2016, pp. 1–4.
4,543,931.
[22] O. A. Mohamad, R. T. Hameed, and N. T¸˘apus¸, “Design and
[10] “Vehicle Fuel System,” http://www.wikipedia.org, 2012, [Online; implementation of real time tracking system based on arduino intel
accessed 16-May-2017]. galileo,” in Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI),
[11] J. T. Risse and J. C. Taggart, “Vehicle fuel system,” Sep. 21 1976, US 2016 8th International Conference on. IEEE, 2016, pp. 1–6.
Patent 3,981,321. [23] P. V. Mistary and R. Chile, “Real time vehicle tracking system based on
[12] R. P. Ballou, R. B. Gelenius, H. A. Haven, and J. E. Shultz, “Vehicle fuel arm7 gps and gsm technology,” in India Conference (INDICON), 2015
system,” Dec. 31 1968, US Patent 3,418,991. Annual IEEE. IEEE, 2015, pp. 1–6.
[13] J. M. Graham, P. P. Kuperus, R. H. Roche, C. H. Tuckey, and M. L. [24] A. El Shafee, M. El Menshawi, and M. Saeed, “Integrating social network
Werner, “Vehicle fuel system,” Oct. 16 2001, US Patent 6,302,144. services with vehicle tracking technologies,” International Journal of
[14] E. C.-W. Lau, “Simple bus tracking system,” Journal of Advanced Computer Applications, vol. 72, no. 11, 2013.
Computer Science and Technology Research, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013. [25] M. Ridhwan, A. Fuad, and M. Drieberg, “Remote vehicle tracking system
[Online]. Available: https://www.sign-ific-ance.co.uk/index.php/ using gsm modem and google map,” in IEEE Conference on Susteinable
JACSTR/article/view/403. Utilization and Development in Engineering and Technology, 2013.
[15] M. N. Ramadan, M. A. Al-Khedher, and S. A. Al-Kheder, “Intelligent [26] R. Minni and R. Gupta, “Low cost real time vehicle tracking system,” in
anti-theft and tracking system for automobiles,” International Journal of Computing, Communications and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT),
Machine Learning and Computing, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 83, 2012. 2013 Fourth International Conference on. IEEE, 2013, pp. 1–5.
[16] S. Raghunath, P. Visalakshmi, and K. Sridhar, “Gps datum conversion [27] Y. Zheng and H. Tang, “Towards a hardware-based system for real-time
and kalman filtering for reducing positional errors,” ASIAN JOURNAL vehicle tracking,” in Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2008 IEEE. IEEE,
OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, vol. 2008, pp. 385–390.
1, no. 5, 2013. [28] “ LinkIt ONE ,” https://www.seeedstudio.com, 2012, [Online; accessed
[17] “Finder GPS Tracking,” http://www.finder-lbs.com, 2009, [Online; 6-May-2017].
Accessed 06-June-2017]. [29] “Geo-fence,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-fence, 2009, [Online;
[18] “Vehicle Fuel System,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board accessed 22-May-2017].
diagnostics, 2009, [Online; Accessed 06-June-2017]. [30] “Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Cloud Computing Services,” https:
[19] “GPS WOX.COM,” https://www.gpswox.com/en/ GPS-OBD-II-2- //aws.amazon.com, 2010, [Online; accessed 24-May-2017].
Tracker, 2014, [Online; accessed 06-June-2017]. [31] “IBM Bluemix,” www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix, 2014,
[20] S. Arslan, M. G¨und¨uzalp, and E. T¨urk, “An embedded system vehicle [Online; accessed 22-May-2017].
tracking system application,” in Electrical, Electronics and Biomedical [32] “Google Cloud IoT,” https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot/, 2016,
Engineering (ELECO), 2016 National Conference on. IEEE, 2016, pp. [Online; accessed 24-May-2017].
447–451.

Fig. 10: The LinkIt One development board. It’s a all-in-one IoT development board [28].

Fig. 11: The prototype design of the system.

628