Efficient Floating Car Data Transmission via LTE for Travel Time Estimation of Vehicles

The travel time estimation of vehicles is a major challenge in the area of dynamic traffic prognosis. Our approach is to increase the number of considered sensor objects in the road network. For this purpose Floating Car Data (FCD) including travel time information of vehicles is transmitted to a server via Long Term Evolution (LTE). In this paper, the benefit of FCD on the accuracy of travel time estimation, depending on the FCD penetration rate is analyzed by an enhanced Nagel-Schreckenberg cellular automaton model. Furthermore, the negative impact of the FCD transmission on the air interface of the cellular communication system is evaluated for various penetration rates and different transmission strategies, including a channel sensitive transmission. Therefore, a close to reality parameterized Markovian model is used. The results show that a penetration rate of a few percent is sufficient for a realistic travel time estimation. The respective influence on the LTE network is tolerable, especially for channel sensitive transmission.