Comparing Wireless Traffic Tracking with Regular Traffic Control Systems for the Detection of Congestions in Streets

Abstract

Detecting congestions on streets is one of the main issues in the area of smart cities. Regular monitoring methods can supply information about the number of vehicles in transit and thus the saturation of the streets, but they are usually expensive and intrusive with respect to the road. In recent years a new trend in traffic detection has arisen, considering the Wireless signals emitted by ‘smart’ on-board devices for counting and tracking vehicles. In this paper, two traffic monitoring methods are compared: detections using a regular Inductive Loop Detector on the road and an own Wireless Tracking System based on Bluetooth detection called Mobywit. The correlation between the day of the week and the hour with the traffic flow in a metropolitan busy street has been analysed. Assuming that our system is not able to defect all the vehicles, but just only subset of them, it is expected a causality between the results obtained using the two methods. This means, that the Bluetooth-based system can detect the same variations in the traffic flow that the regular loop detector, but having two main advantages: the tracking possibilities and a much lower cost.