[System Design] GPS Location Ingestion at Scale: gRPC Streaming, MQTT & Kalman Filter in Ride-Hailing

The Challenge: Millions of Drivers, Every 4 Seconds

Answer-first: Uber and Grab handle 1.25 million GPS write operations per second from ~5 million active drivers. HTTP REST fails at this scale due to per-request TCP+TLS handshake overhead. The solution is persistent connections (gRPC streams or MQTT) with Protobuf serialization, Kalman Filter noise reduction, and batched coordinate uploads — cutting network calls by 67% while maintaining sub-200ms end-to-end latency.

Grab has approximately 5 million drivers operating in Southeast Asia. Uber has over 5 million drivers globally. If every driver sends a GPS coordinate every 4 seconds, the system must receive:

5,000,000 drivers ÷ 4 seconds = 1,250,000 GPS packets / second

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