A Low-Cost Open Hardware System for Collecting Traffic Data Using Wi-Fi Signal Strength

Abstract

Road traffic and its impacts affect various aspects of wellbeing with safety, congestion and pollution being of significant concern in cities. Although there have been a large number of works done in the field of traffic data collection, there are several barriers which restrict the collection of traffic data at higher resolution in the cities. Installation and maintenance costs can act as a disincentive to use existing methods (e.g., loop detectors, video analysis) at a large scale and hence limit their deployment to only a few roads of the city. This paper presents an approach for vehicle counting using a low cost, simple and easily installable system. In the proposed system, vehicles (i.e., bicycles, cars, trucks) are counted by means of variations in the WiFi signals. Experiments with the developed hardware in two different scenarios—low traffic (i.e., 400 objects) and heavy traffic roads (i.e., 1000 objects)—demonstrate its ability to detect cars and trucks. The system can be used to provide estimates of vehicle numbers for streets not covered by official traffic monitoring techniques in future smart cities.

Edge-Computing Video Analytics for Real-Time Traffic Monitoring in a Smart City

“…With the drastic reduction in the cost of electronic components, and recent advances in machine learning and images processing, it is now possible to develop at relatively low cost, edge computing solutions to monitor traffic. For example, Gupta et al [19] designed low-cost hardware using Wi-Fi strength as a signal to monitor traffic. The passage of a car between a transmitter and a receiver produces a variation in signal strength that can be measured to count vehicles flows.…”

LoRa-Based Traffic Flow Detection for Smart-Road

“…This work presents a traffic detection system based on a LoRa network that works with a communication frequency of 868 MHz. We can find in the literature other works of a similar nature that use WiFi communication technologies, IEEE 802.11b [ 14 , 15 ], IEEE 802.11n [ 13 ] or Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks (LPWN) as IEEE 802.15.4 [ 16 ] with communication frequencies in the 2.4 GHz band. Both communication frequencies are within the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands.…”

“…The capacity of these systems grants an ability to monitor human motion by referring to the movement of their limbs [ 12 ]. Other works oriented to monitoring the traffic flow propose the use of different WiFi and ZigBee signals to detect traffic flow, classify the different vehicles, and even monitor their speed [ 10 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ].…”

Estimating Traffic Intensity Employing Passive Acoustic Radar and Enhanced Microwave Doppler Radar Sensor

“…Gupta et al presented a different and interesting idea. They proposed the system for vehicles (i.e., bicycles, cars, trucks) counting by means of variations in the Wi-Fi signals strength [7]. Another approach that was Figure 1.…”

“…Gupta et al presented a different and interesting idea. They proposed the system for vehicles (i.e., bicycles, cars, trucks) counting by means of variations in the Wi-Fi signals strength [7]. Another approach that was related to the monitoring of traffic flow exploited the magnetic sensors to measure the vehicle's magnetic signature (VMS) evoked by moving vehicles [8].…”