A Participatory Urban Traffic Monitoring System: The Power of Bus Riders

Abstract

This paper presents a participatory sensing-based urban traffic monitoring system. Different from existing works that heavily rely on intrusive sensing or full cooperation from probe vehicles, our system exploits the power of participatory sensing and crowdsources the traffic sensing tasks to bus riders' mobile phones. The bus riders are information source providers and, meanwhile, major consumers of the final traffic output. The system takes public buses as dummy probes to detect road traffic conditions, and collects the minimum set of cellular data together with some lightweight sensing hints from the bus riders' mobile phones. Based on the crowdsourced data from participants, the system recovers the bus travel information and further derives the instant traffic conditions of roads covered by bus routes. The real-world experiments with a prototype implementation demonstrate the feasibility of our system, which achieves accurate and fine-grained traffic estimation with modest sensing and computation overhead at the crowd.