Feasibility Study of a GNSS Tracking Application on Android

Abstract

There is a need for better and more accessible tools in the field of location-based services. To address this problem, Here.com proposed a mobile application that allows the tracking of historic and future location of navigation satellites in orbit. The work for this thesis involves the feasibility analysis and implementation of a GNSS tracking application on Android mobile devices that displays historic satellite data in a time lapse slider interface. Considerations have to be made to accommodate the limitations of a mobile device, including limited storage capacity, the consequence of memory leaks, and download data costs. As with any scientific tool, algorithm accuracy and performance efficiency are of utmost importance. Therefore, the work for this thesis includes the study of algorithmic accuracy for GPS coordinate conversion and the analysis of system performance for the application on Android.

The result of this thesis is a solution which involves both a custom implementation and a combination of several open source code. The conclusion provides a few possible future researches to extend the results of this thesis, as well as possible future enhancements that can be made to improve the application.