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ABSTRACT

We consider the problem of monitoring road and traffic conditions in a city. Prior work in this area has required the deployment of dedicated sensors on vehicles and/or on the roadside, or the tracking of mobile phones by service providers. Furthermore, prior work has largely focused on the developed world, with its relatively simple traffic flow patterns. In fact, traffic flow in cities of the developing regions, which comprise much of the world, tends to be much more complex owing to varied road conditions (e.g., potholed roads), chaotic traffic (e.g., a lot of braking and honking), and a heterogeneous mix of vehicles (2-wheelers, 3-wheelers, cars, buses, etc.).

To monitor road and traffic conditions in such a setting, we present Nericell, a system that performs rich sensing by piggybacking on smartphones that users carry around with them. In this demo, we show the use of accelerometer to detect bumps and braking. We also use the microphone to enable honk detection. Nericell addresses several challenges including virtually reorienting the accelerometer on a phone that is at an arbitrary orientation, and performing honk detection and localization in an energy efficient manner.

REFERENCES

• 1: Intelligent Transportation Systems. http://www.its.dot.gov/.
• 2: OnStar by GM. http://www.onstar.com/.
• 3: Jakob Eriksson , Lewis Girod , Bret Hull , Ryan Newton , Samuel Madden , Hari Balakrishnan, The pothole patrol: using a mobile sensor network for road surface monitoring, Proceeding of the 6th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services, June 17-20, 2008, Breckenridge, CO, USA [doi>10.1145/1378600.1378605]
• 4: V. Bychkovsky , K. Chen , M. Goraczko , H. Hu , B. Hull , A. Miu , E. Shih , Y. Zhang , H. Balakrishnan , S. Madden, The CarTel mobile sensor computing system, Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems, October 31-November 03, 2006, Boulder, Colorado, USA [doi>10.1145/1182807.1182866]
• 5: Prashanth Mohan , Venkata N. Padmanabhan , Ramachandran Ramjee, Nericell: rich monitoring of road and traffic conditions using mobile smartphones, Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems, November 05-07, 2008, Raleigh, NC, USA [doi>10.1145/1460412.1460444]
• 6: Jungkeun Yoon , Brian Noble , Mingyan Liu, Surface street traffic estimation, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Mobile systems, applications and services, June 11-13, 2007, San Juan, Puerto Rico [doi>10.1145/1247660.1247686]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.m MISCELLANEOUS

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Measurement

Keywords:
mobile phones, roads, sensing, traffic