Exploiting Wireless Communication in Vehicle Density Estimation

Vehicle density is one of the main metrics used for assessing road traffic condition. High vehicle density indicates that traffic is congested. Currently, most vehicle density estimation approaches are designed for infrastructure-based traffic information systems. These approaches require detection devices such as inductive loop detectors or traffic surveillance cameras to be installed at various locations. Consequently, they are not appropriate for an emerging self-organizing vehicular traffic information system, where vehicles have to collect and process traffic information without relying on any fixed infrastructure. In this paper, we consider a few methods for estimating vehicle density based on the number of vehicles in the vicinity of the probe vehicle and the number of vehicles in a communication cluster.