Dynamic sensing policies for monitoring arterial road traffic

In the United States and numerous other parts of the world, road traffic for a critical part of economic activity. Numerous measures are being taken to address problems arising from traffic congestion. An essential step in this direction is the creation of a traffic monitoring system with capabilities to estimate traffic with significant accuracy and reliability. Historically, dedicated infrastructure has been used for collecting traffic data, however, the corresponding sensors have limited coverage, high installation and maintenance costs, and their fixed position does not enable optimized and adaptive sampling as traffic conditions change. An alternative to using dedicated sensing infrastructure is to leverage an existing communication system such as the cellular phone network.