Proceedings of the 2017 4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical Engineering (ICAEE)

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 remotely if needed at any time. Moreover, A RFID [2], [3]
protect/monitor their properties remotely. In accordance to that, based driver authentication system is added to provide an extra
at present GPS based tracking system is frequently used in layer of security.
vehicle tracking, 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
shipping company because they need to know the position of
the shipping vehicles in a given time. Nowadays, Vehicle
tracking system is used for tracking the vehicle location in real
time.
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 for us. Without the location information of vehicles,
finding a lost or stolen car/motorcycle is very challenging for
law-enforcement agency and it’s a time consuming process.
According to the Dhaka Metropolitan police (DMP) [1],
vehicle thieves usually sell a vehicle part by part which is more
easier than selling the whole vehicle. Sometimes they change
the identification information of vehicles such as chassis and
engine number, and then sell the vehicle to others. In this case,
fleet information of vehicle is needed to find a vehicle within a
short time.
In this paper, we are presenting an Anti-theft Vehicle
Tracking System based on Internet of Things (IoT). It allows
users to track the location of their vehicles in real time from
anywhere. A control switch is provided for turning on/off the
fuel line of vehicles which is efficient when it’s an emergency.
We organized the paper as follows: The Literature Review
is presented in Section II. The Section III which refers to some
recent works related to Vehicle Tracking System. In Section
IV, details of the proposed system is provided. The
experimental description is elaborated in Section V and lastly,
the paper is concluded through a Conclusion given in Section
VI.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. What is Internet of Things (IoT)
The Internet of Things is the connected network between
devices (wearable, portable and house-held devices etc.),
which was first proposed by Prof. Aston while performing the
research related to Radio-frequency identification (RFID) in
1999. The service composition is fully supported by IoT with
various applications. The communication among millions of
devices (any type of internet connected) are possible through
IoT. The Three Layer Architecture (most popular) is illustrated
in Fig. 2. The layers are: Perception, Network and Application
Layer. Sensors, Actuators, Proximity tags (RFID, NFC etc.)
and other emended devices are connected to the IoT via
Perception layer. Network layer establish the communications
between Things and human. User interface/applications are

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provided by Application layer. More details specifications and
applications domain of IoT are nicely listed on [4 –7].
Fig. 2: Three-layer architecture of IoT.
Terms and Basic Definitions:
x Internet of Things (IoT): A network of Internet
connected devices (electrical) able to interchange data
between them using sensors and actuators.
x IoT device: Any type of electrical Internet connected
device/s that can be monitored and/or controlled
through Internet from anywhere(remote location).
x IoT ecosystem: All the components that enable
consumers, governments and businesses to connect
with their IoT devices, including remotes, networks,
dashboards, gateways, storage, analytics and security.
x Entity: Mainly includes the users of IoT system such
as consumers, governments and businesses etc.
x The Physical layer: The physical components
(hardware) that makes an Internet of Things (IoT)
device which includes sensors, actuators and
networking gear.
x The Network layer: The main duty of network layer
is transmitting the data collected from physical layer
to IoT devices.
x The Application layer: All the protocols and
interfaces used by the connected devices for
identification and communication.
x Dashboard: The dashboard is used for visualizing the
information about the Internet of Things ecosystem. It
also used for controlling the IoT ecosystem. It acts as
a special type of remote control for IoT.
x Analytics: Software systems that analyze the data
generated by IoT connected devices. The analysis can
be used for a different purposes, such as predictive
maintenance.
x Storage for IoT: The cloud storage/data bucket,
where data from IoT devices are stored temporary or
permanently .
x The Networks: The Internet communication layer
that enables the entity to communicate with their
embedded devices, and enables devices to
communicate with each other.
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B. Vehicle Fuel System
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. 3: Typical Vehicle Fuel System(left) and a Fuel Pump(right) [10].
The fuel is stored in the fuel tank and the fuel pump is
responsible for flowing the fuel from the tank. The fuel then
travels through the fuel lines and is delivered to the fuel
injectors. When the fuel is delivered, the final conditions for
providing complete combustion are atomization and the spray
pattern of the fuel. More details about vehicle fuel system is
illustrated on [11–13]. Fuel generates the power and the power
moves the car. The engine unable to generate any power if fuel
pump refuses to draw the fuel.
III. RELATED WORKS
Vehicle tracking systems are widely used throughout the
world in different sectors such as smart traffic management
system, vehicle location tracking systems, Anti-theft vehicle
tracking systems, parking management systems, fleet
management, and in the field of Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITS) or Smart transportation systems.
A. Bus Tracking System
A fixed route, simple bus tracking system has been
proposed by Lau in [14]. The system used a smartphone
application and LED display panel for displaying the location
after a specific time interval. The system is very useful for
college/university students who attend classes in big campuses.
As a result, they (students) can spend more time in studying,
sleeping or relaxing rather than wasting time through waiting
for a bus. Nowadays, almost all the European countries are
using similar type of tracking system for public transportation.
B. Anti-Theft Tracking System based on GSM/GPRS
Unauthorized access of any valuable devices/properties can
be prevented by using Anti-Theft Tracking System. Ramadan
and Al-Kheder in [15] presented a prototype design of a
vehicle tracking and anti-theft system for protecting a vehicle
from any intruder by using GPRS/GSM technology. The
system used Kalman filter [16] for minimizing the positional
(GPS coordinates) errors, due to week GPS signal. An abstract
idea for controlling the vehicle’s ignition also proposed there
without proper implementation details. A notebook with
Google Earth is used for monitoring the vehicle’s location and
its status. A Google maps based Smartphone application would
be another alternative to replace the task that the notebook
performs. Fig. 4 shows the architectural view of that system.
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
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
vehicle. The benchmark of the system and more technical
details are not currently available due to their business policy.
A geographical map based mobile application has been
developed (recently) for monitoring the vehicles location. A
typical type of OBD-based vehicle tracking system is
illustrated in Fig. 5.
Fig. 5: A typical OBD based vehicle tracking system [19].
Some other embedded system or Arduino microcontroller
based vehicle tracking system are presented in [20–27].
IV. PROPOSED SYSTEM
A. LinkIt ONE Development Board
The LinkIt ONE development board (Fig.10) is used as the
main control board of our proposed system. It’s an open
source, high-performance board for prototyping Wearable and
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IoT devices. The board is based on MediaTek MT2502A SoC
microcontroller. Some other sensors and module such as
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. 7: Required hardware components for in-vehicle device.
B. In-Vehicle Device
Our In-vehicle device consists of a microcontroller along
with other sensors such as GPS (for collecting location data),
GPRS shield (establish connection with IoT-cloud), a relay
switch (for controlling the fuel pump) and RFID reader for
driver authentication. A Radio frequency based proximity card
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
We have developed a geographical or Google maps based
mobile application that collects the location data from IoT-
cloud and visualize them in real time. As a result, the users can
track the location of their vehicle in real time through the
Mobile application. A virtual control switch for fuel pump is
also added with our application which is responsible for
turning on/off the fuel pump. The virtual control switch allows
users to control the fuel line of the vehicle, that forces the
vehicle to stop within a minute (due to the absence of fuel
supply). The dataflow diagram and the screenshot of the
application are illustrated in Fig. 8. Geo-fence [29] based real
time push notification system is also included with the
application; that notifies the users while the vehicle crosses the
geo-fence defined by users.
Fig. 8: The Mobile application and dataflow diagram of the user application.
V. EXPERIMENTS
We have developed a prototype of the system shown in Fig.
11. Amazon web-service [30] is used as a cloud platform of
our system. IBM Bluemix [31], Google Cloud IoT [32] or any
other IoT-cloud platform can also be used. A battery powered
water motor has been used as fuel pump of the vehicle. It flows
the fuel when power is on. The control switch is mainly
responsible for powering the water motor. The RFID based
authentication switch (fuel pump switch) also turns on the
water pump when it touches the RFID reader. A smartphone
was configured with the developed application that
successfully visualizes the GPS location coming from in-
vehicle device through IoT-cloud in real time.
Fig. 9: The snapshot of the application.
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A push notification(see Fig.9) was invoked on the in-vehicle
device which informs the crossing of the user defined geo-
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. A smart anti-theft vehicle tracking system is presented in
this work. The hardware design and development of our
tracking system has been described in this paper. Some sensors
such as (GPS, GPRS/GSM module, NFC etc.) along with
microcontroller are used for developing in-vehicle device. A
Smartphone application has been developed for visualizing the
location of the vehicle on geographical maps. The system
perfectly tracks the location of vehicles and perfectly controls
the fuel lines anytime from anywhere. We hope that, Our
Internet of Things based proposed system will help owner to
protect their vehicles against theft in a smart way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is acknowledged to all members of IoT Bangladesh
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.
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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.

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