Acquiring road traffic information through mobile phones

Road traffic congestion is a growing problem in many cities around the world. Added with rising fuel cost, people are more than ever interested in road traffic information. Conventional methods to acquire road traffic condition, such as surveillance cameras, have several limitations in large scale implementation including high investment cost and limited coverage. In this paper, we present our work that uses mobile phones as a probing device to collect the cell site data for road traffic information. This approach appears to be a good alternative solution because the use of mobile phones has become so prevalent in today society, especially in the city. The following topics are discussed in this paper: our system architecture, the data collection process, the implementation, and the traffic information services we developed.