This study evaluates the effectiveness of using detailed cellular network signalling data for travel time estimation and route classification. Here, the authors propose a processing pipeline for estimating travel times and route classification based on Cell ID and received signal strength (RSS) measurements from a cellular network. The pipeline combines cellular fingerprinting, particle filtering, integrity monitoring, and map matching based on a hidden Markov model (HMM). The method is evaluated using a dataset of 11,000 cellular RSS measurements with corresponding GPS locations for the city of Norrkoping, Sweden. The basic fingerprinting method has a CEP-67 location accuracy of 111 m and both particle filtering and integrity monitoring improved the results: 79 and 38 m for particle filtering and particle filtering with integrity monitoring, respectively. The route classification method resulted in a precision of 0.83 and a recall of 0.92, which are clear improvements compared to basic map matching of fingerprinting estimates. This new type of noise-adaptive travel time sampling in combination with an HMM-based route classification shows promising results and can potentially support large-scale estimates of both route choice and travel times using detailed cellular network signalling data in urban areas.
Funding Agencies|Swedish Innovation Agency (VINNOVA)Vinnova [2013-03077]