Handover location accuracy for travel time estimation in GSM and UMTS

Field measurements from the GSM and UMTS networks are analysed in a road traffic information context. The measurements indicate a potentially large improvement using UMTS signalling data compared with GSM regarding handover location accuracy. These improvements can be used to generate real-time traffic information with higher quality and extend the geographic usage area for cellular-based travel time estimation systems. The results confirm previous reports indicating that the technology has a large potential in GSM and also show that the potential might be even larger and more flexible using UMTS. Assuming that non-vehicle terminals can be filtered out, that vehicles are tracked to the correct route and that handovers can be predicted correctly, a conclusion from the experiments is that the handover location accuracy in both GSM and UMTS will be sufficient to estimate useful travel times, also in urban environments. In a real system, these tasks are typically very challenging, especially in an urban environment. Further, it is reasonably established that the location error will be minor for the data obtained from UMTS.