Tracking vehicular speed variations by warping mobile phone signal strengths

—In this paper, we consider the problem of tracking fine-grained speeds variations of vehicles using signal strength traces from GSM enabled phones. Existing speed estimation techniques using mobile phone signals can provide longer-term speed averages but cannot track short-term speed variations. Understanding short-term speed variations, however, is important in a variety of traffic engineering applications—for example, it may help distinguish slow speeds due to traffic lights from traffic congestion when collecting real time traffic information. Using mobile phones in such applications is particularly attractive because it can be readily obtained from a large number of vehicles. Our approach is founded on the observation that the largescale path loss and shadow fading components of signal strength readings (signal profile) obtained from the mobile phone on any given road segment appears similar over multiple trips along the same road segment except for distortions along the...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: PERCOM
• Authors: Gayathri Chandrasekaran, Tam Vu, Alexander Varshavsky, Marco Gruteser, Richard P. Martin, Jie Yang, Yingying Chen
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Estimation Techniques, PERCOM 2011, Road Segment, Road Segments