Handover location accuracy for travel time estimation in GSM and UMTS

In this paper, field measurements from the GSM and UMTS networks are analysed in a road traffic information context. The measurements indicate a p otentially large improvement using UMTS signalling data compared to GSM regard ing handover location accuracy. These improvements can be used to generate real-time traffic information with higher quality and extend the geographic usage area for cellular based travel time estimation systems. The r esults confirm previous reports ind icating that he technology has a large p otential in GSM and they also show that the potential might be even larger u sing UMTS. Assuming that non vehicle terminals can be filtered out, that veh icles are tracked to the correct route and that handovers can be predicted co rrectly, a conclusion from the experiments is that the handov er location accuracy in both GSM and UMTS will be sufficient to estimate useful travel times, also in urban environments. If there is a scalable way of doing this filtering, tracking and prediction in urban environments is not clear to the authors t oday.