Road Traffic Tracking by using Location Management data in wireless cellular networks (TTLM)

Inhalt:
The need for increased individual mobility has resulted in a significant and continuous increase of road traffic density. More and more, the roads are getting congested. Modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are offering methods to avoid these congestions. However, this requires a dense surveillance system of sensors that is very costly. Thus, due to financial constraints, not all roads are equipped with such sensors. Especially the secondary and tertiary roads are generally sacrificed. Thus, a complete real-time traffic monitoring of all available road systems is not guaranteed. This calls for new and flexible tracking systems which offer full coverage, high flexibility, synergy with available or already implemented systems and all this at a very high performance to cost ratio. Such a novel solution is presented in this paper. It uses location management data from wireless cellular networks and doesn’t require external sensors. The mobile phones, which have become ubiquitous devices carried by people moving inside the cars, are implicitly used as sensors. The key contribution of this paper is to show how cellular networks can perform a sensing task, in this case of road traffic information, while using functions they need for their normal operation, in this case the mobility management ones. Thus, the cellular network can be seen as a type of sensor network (even if not an ad-hoc one). This new service concept opens new revenue opportunities for cellular operators. The concept presented in this paper is named TTLM (an abbreviation for Traffic Tracking using Location Management functions of cellular networks).