Traffic Analysis Based on Bluetooth Passive Scanning

During the last decade, Bluetooth has become a widespread feature in the automobile industry, meaning that its signal activity can be correlated with road traffic. Using this technology as a means for assessing traffic is very cost-effective and has a low impact on the infrastructure. Nevertheless, unlike other techniques, it does not provide direct sensing of vehicles only. Statistical analysis methods need to be applied to the collected data. In this paper, we first propose a machine learning method for traffic flow estimation using Bluetooth sensors. We also propose a method for estimating the mean travel speed between two sensors. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated through eight weeks of experimentation. Finally, we envision a potential solution for building real-time Origin- Destination matrices.