Counting vehicles: Learning from animal population estimation

In the soon-to-be realized IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) system, vehicles are supposed to broadcast their movement information periodically. Although this beaconing mechanism has been designed mainly to reduce the risk of vehicle crashes in various driving contexts, it can easily be exploited for implementing many other applications. In particular, applications such as traffic situation monitoring and safety message overload control can be enabled by just counting the beacons. Counter to our intuition, however, simple counting is inadequate to enumerate the real vehicle population and generally leads to underestimation. This article first sheds light on this aspect, and then discusses how it can be overcome by drawing from experiences in wild animal counting in ecological studies.