Vehicle-based Sensor Networks for Traffic Monitoring

The existing vehicle-based sensors of taxi companies in most of cities can be used for traffic monitoring, however sensors are always set with a long sampling interval because of communication cost saving and network congestion avoidance. In this paper, we are interested in understanding what performance for traffic monitoring we might expect from such vehicle-based mobile sensor networks providing sparse and incomplete information. This is a fundamental problem need to be solved. A performance evaluation study has been carried out in Shanghai by utilizing the sensors installed on 4000 taxis. Two types of traffic status estimation algorithms, the link-based and the vehicle-based, are introduced based on such data basis. The results from large-scale testing cases show that the traffic status can be fairly well estimated based on these imperfect data and we demonstrate the feasibility of such application in most of cities. Keywords-vehicle-based mobile sensor networks; GPS; traffic monitoring; Intelligent Transportation System(ITS);