A framework for realistic vehicular network modeling using planet-scale public webcams

  • Authors:
  • Gautam S. Thakur;Pan Hui;Ahmed Helmy

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA;Telekom Innovation Laboratories, Berlin, Germany;University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 4th ACM international workshop on Hot topics in planet-scale measurement
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Realistic design and evaluation of vehicular mobility has been particularly challenging due to a lack of large-scale real-world measurements in the research community. Current mobility models and simulators rely on artificial scenarios and use small and biased samples. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel framework for large-scale monitoring, analysis, modeling, and visualization of vehicular traffic using freely available online webcams. We follow a data-driven approach that examine six metropolitan regions' more than 800 locations and 25 million vehicular mobility records around the world. Initial analysis of traffic densities show 80% temporal correlation during various hours of a day. The modeling of empirical traffic densities against known theoretical models show less than 5% deviation for heavy-tailed distributions such as Weibull. We believe this framework and the dataset provide a much-needed contribution to the research community for realistic and data-driven design and evaluation of vehicular networks.