On February 8, 2008, CCIT, Caltrans, Nokia, and UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering collaborated to conduct an unprecedented experiment in the area of traffic monitoring. Mobile Century was intended as a proof of concept. The event was enormously successful, both technically and logistically.

The goal of this controlled field experiment was to test traffic data collection from GPS-equipped cell phones driving on a stretch of a highway located in the San Francisco Bay Area. One hundred vehicles carrying the GPS-enabled Nokia N95 drove along a 10-mile stretch of I-880 from 9:30am to 6:30pm. Given the number of vehicles, the probe vehicles constituted a penetration rate of 2 to 5% along this section. The phones stored vehicle speed and position information every 3 seconds. These measurements were sent wirelessly to a server for real-time processing.

Under joint sponsorship from Caltrans and Nokia, the Mobile Century experiment enabled the design and development of algorithms and data collection systems to assemble traffic data from GPS-equipped mobile phones.

The principal objectives for this experiment were to feature 1) online, real-time data processing; 2) privacy-preservation; 3) data efficiency, i.e. not requiring excessive cellular network load.

Mobile Century successfully accomplished two additional objectives:

1. Effected a penetration rate of roughly 2 to 5%, which will become reality within the next couple of years as GPS-enabled smart phones penetrate the market;

2. Tested the scalability of current system implementation in the light of a planned field deployment involving thousands of vehicles.

The data collected during the experiment constitutes a completely unprecedented goldmine to study the trade-offs between data volumes, information quality and privacy concerns, an effort that is currently underway.

With 100 vehicles transmitting data simultaneously, Mobile Century also enabled the team to test several critical aspects of the current system: bandwidth, ability to handle higher data volumes, robustness of the algorithms to measurement errors, as well as real-time and online capabilities of our algorithms.

Ultimately, this project tried to create a paradigm shift in traffic data collection. Mobile probes deployed as part of a self-sustaining business model will complement the existing fixed sensors that are funded by state and local governments.

On February 8, 2008, CCIT, Caltrans, Nokia, and UC Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering collaborated to conduct an unprecedented experiment in the area of traffic monitoring. Mobile Century was intended as a proof of concept. The event was enormously successful, both technically and logistically.

The goal of this controlled field experiment was to test traffic data collection from GPS-equipped cell phones driving on a stretch of a highway located in the San Francisco Bay Area. One hundred vehicles carrying the GPS-enabled Nokia N95 drove along a 10-mile stretch of I-880 from 9:30am to 6:30pm. Given the number of vehicles, the probe vehicles constituted a penetration rate of 2 to 5% along this section. The phones stored vehicle speed and position information every 3 seconds. These measurements were sent wirelessly to a server for real-time processing.

Under joint sponsorship from Caltrans and Nokia, the Mobile Century experiment enabled the design and development of algorithms and data collection systems to assemble traffic data from GPS-equipped mobile phones.

The principal objectives for this experiment were to feature 1) online, real-time data processing; 2) privacy-preservation; 3) data efficiency, i.e. not requiring excessive cellular network load.