Deriving traffic data from a cellular network

Abstract

Acquiring high quality origin destination information for the vehicle traffic in a geographic area is a tedious and costly task. Traditional methods are expensive, time-consuming and generally only present a snapshot of the traffic situation at a certain time. The technique developed in this paper exploits the use of data already at hand in a GSM network. Instead of monitoring vehicles flows, mobile phones flows are measured and are correlated to the traffic flow. This methodology is based on the fact that a GSM network always knows an estimated position of each terminal, referred to the location area of the base station that provides services to it. For a pilot study a GSM network simulator has been designed to generate a synthetic database with location registers, which is then processed mathematically and transformed into traffic data. Primary results show great potential of this method.