HERO: Online Real-Time Vehicle Tracking in Shanghai

Intelligent transportation systems have become increasingly important for the public transportation in Shanghai. In response, ShanghaiGrid (SG) aims to provide abundant intelligent transportation services to improve the traffic condition. A challenging service in SG is to accurately locate the positions of moving vehicles in real time. In this paper we present an innovative scheme HERO to tackle this problem. In SG, the location information of individual vehicles is actively logged in local nodes which are distributed throughout the city. For each vehicle, HERO dynamically maintains an advantageous hierarchy on the overlay network of local nodes to conservatively update the location information only in nearby nodes. By bounding the maximum number of hops the query is routed, HERO guarantees to meet the real-time constraint associated with each vehicle. Extensive simulations based on the real road network and trace data of vehicle movements from Shanghai demonstrate the efficacy of HERO.