Mobile cellular networks can serve as ubiquitous sensors for physical mobility. We propose a method to infer vehicle travel times on highways and to detect road congestion in real-time, based solely on anonymized signaling data collected from a mobile cellular network. Most previous studies have considered data generated from mobile devices active in calls, namely Call Detail Records (CDR), an approach that limits the number of observable devices to a small fraction of the whole population. Our approach overcomes this drawback by exploiting the whole set of signaling events generated by both idle and active devices. While idle devices contribute with a large volume of spatially coarse-grained mobility data, active devices provide finer-grained spatial accuracy for a limited subset of devices. The combined use of data from idle and active devices improves congestion detection performance in terms of coverage, accuracy, and timeliness. We apply our method to real mobile signaling data obtained from an operational network during a one-month period on a sample highway segment in the proximity of a European city, and present an extensive validation study based on ground-truth obtained from a rich set of reference datasources—road sensor data, toll data, taxi floating car data, and radio broadcast messages.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    The Cellular Network as a Sensor: From Mobile Phone Data to Real-Time Road Traffic Monitoring


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2015-10-01


    Size :

    3406261 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Highway real-time traffic monitoring method based on mobile phone signaling

    WANG GUANGSHAN | European Patent Office | 2015

    Free access

    Speed prediction from mobile sensors using cellular phone‐based traffic data

    Basyoni, Yarah / Abbas, Hazem M. / Talaat, Hoda et al. | Wiley | 2017

    Free access

    Innovative Smart Road Stud Sensor Network Development for Real-Time Traffic Monitoring

    Zhimin Tao / Wei Quan / Hua Wang | DOAJ | 2022

    Free access

    Speed prediction from mobile sensors using cellular phone-based traffic data

    Basyoni, Yarah / Abbas, Hazem M. / Talaat, Hoda et al. | IET | 2017

    Free access