Vehicular Traffic Monitoring Using Bluetooth Scanning Over a Wireless Sensor Network

The ubiquitous nature of Bluetooth equipped devices has made it opportunistic to scavenge information that can be repurposed for applications other than initially intended. One such opportunity is in vehicular traffic monitoring, whereby sampling of Bluetooth radios serve as proxies for vehicles and consequently for traffic density and flow. This paper discusses a complete data collection system developed at the University of Manitoba that utilizes a variety of wireless networking technologies and devices to collect inferred traffic data at an intersection along a major thoroughfare in an urban setting. Specifically, a wireless sensor network of slave probes was designed and implemented with the objective to collect Bluetooth device information for this purpose. To facilitate easy setup and a long battery life, a solar-powered probe design was investigated. Data from each slave probe is communicated to a master node through XBee communication, where it is stored on a secure digital (SD) memory card before being transmitted to a central server every five minutes over a global system for mobile communications (GSM) cellular network. The server parses the data received and stores it in a database. Consumer and corporate websites may then access this database to display archived data or current data in real-time to various users.