The push problem
When a rider watches a driver approach, the driver position must flow to the rider with low latency. Polling repeatedly wastes resources and adds delay, so positions are pushed over a persistent connection.
Fan out by interest
- A driver publishes to a topic keyed by trip or by region.
- Only the subscribers of that topic receive updates, so a position is not blasted to everyone.
- A connection layer holds websockets or server sent event streams and routes updates to the right sockets.
Smoothing the experience
- Send deltas at a steady rate rather than every raw ping to bound bandwidth.
- The client interpolates between updates so the marker glides instead of jumping.
- On reconnect the client requests the latest position so it never shows a stale location after a gap.
Key idea
Real time location streaming pushes deltas over persistent connections to interested subscribers, while clients interpolate to render smooth motion.