FUNDAMENTAL ANALYSIS OF TRAVEL TIME MONITORING USING BLUETOOTH

Abstract

Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances. It is commonly equipped in many kinds of mobile devises such as car navigation system, headsets, mobile phones and smart phones. Because Bluetooth has a unique ID number to each device, which is called as MAC address, it would be possible to measure travel time if MAC address could be monitored and it could be identified among the monitoring sites. Traffic measurement systems using Bluetooth have been studied and partially implemented in many countries, but not in Japan so far.
This paper investigated the possibility of travel time monitoring on the basis of MAC address detection by using Bluetooth in Japan. We developed a Bluetooth receiver collecting MAC addresses within its out-reach and a system calculating the time difference between the same MAC addresses were monitored at the difference data collection sites. This system was applied to the arterial road network in Osaka city and Hanshin expressway network and validated by using the data collected from traffic detectors.
As a result, it is revealed that i) it is able to collect 2-7 unique MAC addresses per one minutes in the urban area, though it depends on the data collection site, ii) travel time can be measured by this system every 10 minutes for arterial road network and every 15 minutes for Hanshin expressway, and iii) The travel time measured by the proposed system fits the travel time estimated by using traffic detectors.