Arterial Traffic Monitoring Using Integrated Wi-Fi-Bluetooth System
Asad Lesani, Taras Romancyshyn, Luis Miranda-Moreno · Transportation Research Board 95th Annual MeetingTransportation Research Board · 2016
There are a number of sensory systems available in the market to monitor traffic networks. However, these types of technologies cannot provide detailed data of a users’ trip pattern (O-D matrices) and speed over the network. To achieve this, the system should be able to collect anonymous data of the vehicles in the network. In recent studies, Bluetooth (BT) technology has widely been used as a motor-vehicle traffic monitoring system using captured unique Media Access Control (MAC) address of BT devices. The use of this technology has nonetheless been limited due to security and power consumption concerns and the availability of fewer applications in recent developed smartphones and apps. Hence, in this paper the authors developed and tested an integrated Bluetooth-WiFi system to cover more devices using both technologies. The developed system can work in real time with a pre-defined adjustable scan interval. A high sensitivity class I Bluetooth module is used to increase the detection range of the system. The system performance was tested against ground truth data coming from manual video processing at 5 min and 15 min intervals. The initial results indicated a higher detection rate in comparison with the BT technology. In addition, the speed estimation errors decreased from 8.6% (just Bluetooth) to 5.8% (Bluetooth-WiFi). Although the usage of BT in recent years has dropped, there is merit in having both technologies integrated into the same system, particularly in urban traffic networks.