Mobile Phone Location Area Based Traffic Flow Estimation in Urban Road Traffic

Signaling data of cellular phones can be used as valuable information for state-of-the-art traffic applications especially in urban areas. The traces of mobiles like handovers and location area updates may be efficiently utilized in the field of road traffic measurement and forecasting or even traffic control. By detecting and processing the locomotion of anonymous mobile phones, origin-destination flows and trip distribution can be inferred. This information may serve as important basis for transportation planning, and even for realtime applications, such as traffic control or route guidance. The proposed method apply only passive signaling events generated by the user and captured by the cellular system operator. Therefore, it does not require additional infrastructure on the operator-side or the use of any active application on the client-side such as GPS. Moreover, it can be applied in 2G as well as 3G cellular systems.