Hello Guys,
I work at a large factory, we have a moderately large fleet of vehicles. Our Fleet varies from Super links to bakkies, most are sent around the country to deliver goods to our various clients' premises.
Because it is such a large fleet of vehicles, the people in the head office had to employ me to monitor their vehicle's routes. I am able to do so because of the contractors, who placed tracking devices in all of the vehicles.
(some relevant information)
The large vehicles are supposed to be monitored for taking longer routes, bad roads or stealing diesel.
The smaller vehicles would be monitored for abusive driving, sleeping on the job, or just for logistical purposes as is the case with the heavy vehicles.
The tracking works via gps units with a built in gsm (txt/call) and gprs (packet based) communications.
In theory the unit stores it's gps co-ordinates as the vehicle is moving around. Once it gets a signal from the tower or base station, it relays these information through to the server which they host inernationally.
We access their server which then tells us where our vehicles are moving, usually the timing is out by a couple of seconds 15-20.
We are seeing a lot of discrepancies while accessing the tracking server. While I am following the stops of the average vehicle they 1/15 times will have stopped sending locations to their server. So I won't be able to see where the vehicle movements for that period. Until I ask them to 'look into the problem' for us.
They have had more explanations than I could ever care to remember, but one excuse that was most recent is the following..
According to them their unit is sending the gps co-ordinates of the vehicle's movements to their server, but due to vodacom's gprs towers being down (apparently for upgrades) the unit's think they are sending the data, or the tower responds that it recieved the data but nothing was ever delivered.
If I am not mistaken this is characteristic of the UDP communications protocall. One where redundancy is not of very high importance.
One would expect a tracking company would use a more redundant form of communication than this.
What my problem with the above explanation is, is then why aren't all our other vehicles having similar issues.
Perhaps it could be the tower that the unit was communicating with (since it was the only vehicle that goes into this specific zone daily).
Would anyone here, experienced in the field of programming, communications or even tracking
be willing to provide an input on this subject?
Best Regards
Imminent
I work at a large factory, we have a moderately large fleet of vehicles. Our Fleet varies from Super links to bakkies, most are sent around the country to deliver goods to our various clients' premises.
Because it is such a large fleet of vehicles, the people in the head office had to employ me to monitor their vehicle's routes. I am able to do so because of the contractors, who placed tracking devices in all of the vehicles.
(some relevant information)
The large vehicles are supposed to be monitored for taking longer routes, bad roads or stealing diesel.
The smaller vehicles would be monitored for abusive driving, sleeping on the job, or just for logistical purposes as is the case with the heavy vehicles.
The tracking works via gps units with a built in gsm (txt/call) and gprs (packet based) communications.
In theory the unit stores it's gps co-ordinates as the vehicle is moving around. Once it gets a signal from the tower or base station, it relays these information through to the server which they host inernationally.
We access their server which then tells us where our vehicles are moving, usually the timing is out by a couple of seconds 15-20.
The problem is this:
We are seeing a lot of discrepancies while accessing the tracking server. While I am following the stops of the average vehicle they 1/15 times will have stopped sending locations to their server. So I won't be able to see where the vehicle movements for that period. Until I ask them to 'look into the problem' for us.
They have had more explanations than I could ever care to remember, but one excuse that was most recent is the following..
According to them their unit is sending the gps co-ordinates of the vehicle's movements to their server, but due to vodacom's gprs towers being down (apparently for upgrades) the unit's think they are sending the data, or the tower responds that it recieved the data but nothing was ever delivered.
If I am not mistaken this is characteristic of the UDP communications protocall. One where redundancy is not of very high importance.
One would expect a tracking company would use a more redundant form of communication than this.
What my problem with the above explanation is, is then why aren't all our other vehicles having similar issues.
Perhaps it could be the tower that the unit was communicating with (since it was the only vehicle that goes into this specific zone daily).
Would anyone here, experienced in the field of programming, communications or even tracking
be willing to provide an input on this subject?Best Regards
Imminent