A DSRC-Based Traffic Flow Monitoring and Lane

Detection System

Nima Alam1, Asghar Tabatabaie Balaie2, Andrew G. Dempster1

1
School of Surveying & Spatial Information Systems
2
School of Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia

Abstract— Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are
developing to increase transportation efficiency and mitigate its
negative impacts on society. Traffic flow monitoring, traffic
guidance and traffic signal control are some of ITS applications
relying on vehicle passage rate in the streets. There are already
some conventional techniques for vehicle counting. In this work a
novel method is proposed for vehicle passage and lane detection
based on the relative acceleration between the vehicle and two
anchor nodes which broadcast packets periodically using
Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), the nominated
medium for vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure
communication. Depending on the speed of the vehicle, the
performance of the proposed method is 95% or higher.
Keywords- DSRC;Intelligent Transportation Systems; Traffic
Flow Monitoring
I. INTRODUCTION
Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are considered to
improve the quality of transportation and mitigate the negative
impacts of transportation on the environment and society.
Knowledge of the rate and speed of the vehicles in each lane of
a road is a basic requirement for some ITS applications such as
traffic flow monitoring, traffic flow guidance, and traffic signal
control. There are different existing methods to measure the
rate and speed of vehicles passing a monitor. Radar sensors,
infrared sensors, burial inductive loops, laser sensors, and
machine vision are among them [1]. Although these systems
have been employed for some years, there is still research
potential for some of them, especially vision-based techniques
[2-5].
Mostly focusing on safety issues, Dedicated Short Range
Communication (DSRC) is an emerging technology for
vehicle-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communication
accompanying ITS applications [6-8]. Although the primitive
objective for vehicular communication is data sharing among
the ITS entities, other applications can also be considered [9,
10]. To take full advantage of a vehicular communication
platform, a real time vehicle counting and lane detection
system is proposed in this work. Some advantages of the
proposed method over conventional systems include
insensitivity to day and night light exposure compared to vision
systems, lower hardware and installation costs compared to
laser scanners, and more reliability and easier installation and
maintenance than buried loops. In section II, vehicular
communication and related works, based on vehicular
communication, is briefly discussed. Section III, explains the
problem and proposed solution. In section IV, the simulation
results are discussed. Section V summarizes the contributions.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Vehicular Communication
Considering the harsh vehicular environment and related
communication concerns such as high level of the mobility of
the nodes, multipath, and environmental dynamics caused by
vehicles and pedestrians, a modified version of the Wireless
Local Area Network (WLAN) protocol, IEEE802.11p has
been proposed for Wireless Access in the Vehicular
Environment (WAVE). A dedicated bandwidth of 75MHz in
the 5.850 to 5.925 GHz band has been assigned for vehicle-
vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communication by the U.S.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) [11]. Similarly,
the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI)
and Japanese Association of Radio Industries and Businesses
(ARIB) have dedicated a similar bandwidth for such
communication [12, 13]. This bandwidth is called Dedicated
Short Range Communication (DSRC). DSRC channels are
shared for the network nodes using Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing (OFDM)[14, 15].
B. Communication-Based Traffic Flow Monitoring
In the literature, proposed traffic flow monitoring systems,
which operate based on vehicular communication, mostly rely
on position information of the participating vehicles being
provided by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). In
[16-19] some examples of these systems are proposed.
Considering the problems and shortcomings of GNSS-based
positioning in urban canyons and the unavailability of this
facility in covered areas such as tunnels, the technique
presented in this work does not depend on the absolute position
information of the vehicles. In addition to this novelty, the
proposed method can determine the lane of the passing vehicle.
This functionality expands the proposed system applicability
for traffic flow guidance and traffic flow signaling besides
traffic flow monitoring.

978-1-4244-8331-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

 III. VEHICLE PASSAGE AND LANE DETECTION above. Acceleration difference profiles for different speeds are
shown in Figure 3. As can be seen, although the peak of the
A. Problem Definition
acceleration profile varies with speed, it occurs at the same
Assume there are two beacons, with known coordinates and location along the street. This implies that vehicle passage can
similar heights, on each side of a two lane street opposite each be detected at somewhere fixed along the street independent of
other. Figure 1 shows the situation. Without losing generality, the speed.
assume that the X axis is the separating line of the lanes and the
coordinate of the beacons is zero along this axis. Assume a car C. Relative Acceleration Estimation
is travelling in one of the lanes and receives the packets For estimating the relative accelerations between the
broadcast by the beacons through DSRC. These packets vehicle and the beacons, assume that beacons are broadcasting
contain position and height information of the beacons and the some packets periodically with the period of Δt and the data
period of packet transmission. content includes their position and height. It can be simply
The problem to be solved is estimation of the lane of the assumed that two beacons can broadcast over one channel of
vehicle when it passes between the beacons and the time of DSRC without packet collision if the packet length is small
passage based on the data of the received packets from two enough compared to Δt.
beacons. The key to the solution for this problem is the
relative acceleration difference between the vehicle and the
two beacons. The proposed method can be extended to more
lanes, requiring more complexity, as future work. Here, only a
two lane scenario is considered.
B. Problem Solution Based on Relative Acceleration
In Figure 1, assume that the height difference between the Figure 1. Problem definition
vehicle and the beacons is h. The vehicle can calculate h, if it
knows the height of beacons, with regard to its antenna height.
Assuming (x,y) as the coordinate of the vehicle at time t and
(xi,yi) as the coordinates of beacon i (i = 1,2). The range
between the vehicle and beacon i at time t is:

ri = ( x − xi ) 2 + ( y − yi ) 2 + h 2 (1)

Assuming a low acceleration for the vehicle along the

street, i.e. the X axis, and zero speed perpendicular to the
street, i.e. along the Y axis, relative acceleration between the
vehicle and beacon i is:

ψi = =
[
d 2 ri v 2 ( y − yi ) 2 + h 2 ] (2)
dt 2 ri3
Figure 2. Acceleration difference profiles for different lanes
where v is the velocity of the vehicle along the street. The
acceleration difference, Δψ=ψ1- ψ2 , is:

⎡ ( y − y1 ) 2 + h 2 ( y − y2 ) 2 + h 2 ⎤
Δψ = v 2 ⎢ − ⎥ (3)
⎣ r13 r23 ⎦

Now, x1=x2=0 m. w is the width of street and y1= w/2 and

y2 = -w/2. Also, y = w/4 when traveling in lane 1 and y = -w/4
when traveling in lane 2, using nominal values w=8 m, h=5 m,
and arbitrary speed of 15 m/s for the vehicle, the acceleration
difference profile is depicted in Figure 2. As can be seen, it is
possible to determine the lane of the vehicle when passing
through the beacons based on the pattern of the acceleration
difference which hits opposite peaks for the two lanes. This
pattern changes with parameters v, w, and h. For the rest of
this article, w and h are considered to have the values assigned
Figure 3. Acceleration difference profile for different speeds in lane 1
 In the vehicle, for each received packet there is: ⎡ TRi ( k ) − 2TRi ( k − 1) + TRi ( k − 2) ⎤
ψˆ i ( k ) = c ⎢ (11)
⎣ Δt 2 ⎥⎦
τ i (k ) = [TRi (k ) + δ (k ) + ζ i (k )] − [TTi (k ) + δ i (k )] − τ Pi (4)
and estimation error is:
where k is the current epoch, τi is the signal flight time between
the beacon i and the vehicle, TRi is the receive time tag in the
⎡ ζ ( k ) − 2ζ i ( k − 1) + ζ i ( k − 2) ⎤ (12)
receiver, TTi is the transmit time tag of the beacon i, δ is the ei ( k ) = c ⎢ i ⎥⎦
current clock error of the vehicle, ζi is the receive time tag ⎣ Δt 2
quantization error for received packet from beacon i, δi is the As can be seen, the estimation error is a combination of
current clock error of the beacon i, and τPi is the total receiver time tag quantization errors over the last three epochs.
processing time for beacon i and vehicle. Assuming a constant The important point in equation (12) is the increasing error
processing time τPi, equation (4) for the previous epoch is: with decreasing period of packet transmission, Δt. However,
any increase of Δt for noise mitigation causes loss of
acceleration tracking for fast dynamics. The estimate of the
τ i (k − 1) = [TRi (k − 1) + δ (k − 1) + ζ i (k − 1)] acceleration difference is:
(5)
− [TTi (k − 1) + δ i (k − 1)] − τ Pi
Δψˆ = ψˆ1 (k ) − ψˆ 2 (k ) (13)
Subtracting (5) from (4) results in:
For a sample estimate of acceleration difference with
τ i (k ) − τ i (k − 1) = TRi (k ) − TRi (k − 1) + λΔt − Δt equation (13), assume v=15 m/s and Δt=10 ms. Considering 3
(6) Mb/s for DSRC bit rate and 200 bytes per packet , the length of
− λi Δt + ζ i ( k ) − ζ i (k − 1) each packet will be less than 1 ms. This is small enough to
where λ and λi are the clock drifts of the vehicle and beacon i allow packet broadcast with 10 ms intervals. Also assume that
respectively and: a vehicle is within range of the beacons at a distance of 100 m
in lane 1 (x= -100 m, y=2 m) and continues in the same lane to
x=100 m and y=2 m. Receive time tag quantization error is
⎧δ (k ) − δ (k − 1) = λΔt
⎪ considered 1/180 µs. This amount is set with regard to MK2
(7)
⎨δ i (k ) − δ i (k − 1) = λi Δt WAVE-DSRC radio from Cohda WirelessTM [20].Figure 4
⎪T (k ) − T (k − 1) = Δt shows the estimated acceleration differences over the vehicle
⎩ Ti Ti
travel time. As can be seen, the estimated acceleration
Multiplying by c, the speed of light, in (6) and difference is very noisy and the actual pattern, depicted in
rearrangement results in: Figure 2, which is expected to happen when passing the
beacons, at t=6.67 s, is lost in the estimated acceleration
cτ i (k ) − cτ i (k − 1) ⎡ T (k ) − TRi (k − 1) − Δt ⎤ difference.
= c ⎢ Ri ⎥⎦
Δt ⎣ Δt (8) D. Detection of the Lane and Vehicle Passage based on
c Estimated Acceleration Difference
+ c(λ − λi ) + (ζ i (k ) − ζ i (k − 1))
Δt For extracting the acceleration difference pattern, or
Assuming small Δt, for example of 10 ms, over which
equivalently detecting the vehicle passage, we define the
vehicle speed is constant, the left side of the equation (8)
correlation function between the expected pattern and
represents the range-rate between the beacon i and the vehicle:
estimated acceleration difference. The following correlation
function is defined:
⎡TRi (k ) − TRi (k − 1) − Δt ⎤
ωi (k ) = c ⎢ ⎥⎦ + c(λ − λi ) t t
⎣ Δt (9) K
c
G (t ) =
v4 ∫ α∫ β (vτ − vt + α 2) Δψˆ (τ )d 2τ (14)
+ (ζ i (k ) − ζ i (k − 1)) α
t− v t− v
Δt
From equation (9), the acceleration between the vehicle and where α is the length of the street over which the correlation
beacon i is: window is defined, t is current time, 1/v4 is used for
normalization of the G(t) for different speeds, K is an arbitrary
constant to achieve a certain peak for G(t), β is the correlating
ωi (k ) − ωi ( k − 1) pattern:
ψ i (k ) = =
Δt
⎡ T ( k ) − 2TRi ( k − 1) + TRi ( k − 2) ⎤ (10) ⎧Δψ ( x) , − α 2 ≤ x ≤ α 2 (15)
c ⎢ Ri β ( x) = ⎨
⎣ Δt 2 ⎥⎦ ⎩ 0 , otherwise
where Δψ is defined by equation (3). Figure 5 shows β for
⎡ ζ (k ) − 2ζ i (k − 1) + ζ i ( k − 2) ⎤
+ c⎢ i ⎥⎦ different speeds. Double integration in equation (14) helps
⎣ Δt 2 mitigate noise. Assuming β is a dimensionless entity, K=105
As can be seen, the effect of clock drifts is eliminated in m3/s4, α=10 m, and apply the estimated acceleration of Figure 4
Eq. (10) if drift is assumed to have a constant rate over such a to Equation (14), Figure 6 shows the result. As can be seen, the
short interval. Regarding this equation, the relative acceleration acceleration difference pattern is detected by the proposed
between the vehicle and beacon i can be estimated by: correlating method. Considering Figure 2, if the vehicle travels
in lane 2, the correlation function hits the negative peak. This
can be used for lane detection. The correlation peak is
independent of v but depends on α, w, h, and K. Knowing these
parameters, the maximum of G(t) can be calculated by
replacing Equation (3) in Equation (14) instead of estimated
acceleration difference.
Figure 4. Estimated acceleration difference
Figure 5. Correlating pattern
Figure 6. Ideal and estimated correlation function for the signal in Figure
4
Having this maximum, a threshold for peak detection can
be defined. The latency of this method is important. Regarding
Figure 6, the correlation peak occurs with a delay after passing
the beacons which is equivalent to some displacement on the
street, or X axis, and we call this xd. Knowing this displacement
is important for instant position estimation of the vehicle when
it passes between the beacons. Once this displacement is
known, the position of the vehicle can be estimated based on
the position of the beacons which is broadcast by them. xd is
the point that G(t) is maximum. For calculating xd, the
differential of G(t) with ideal acceleration difference , Equation
(3), must be zero. This with a variable conversion from time to
position along the X axis results in:
xd
∫ Δψ ( x)Δψ ( x − x
xd −α
d + α 2)dx = 0 (16)
and the smallest positive root is xd. It is obvious from Equation
(16) that displacement xd does not depend on the speed of the
vehicle and solving this equation leads to xd= α, i.e.
displacement is always equal to correlation window size.
IV. SIMULATION AND RESULTS
The tool which was used in this simulation is MATLAB
version 7.9.0.529(R2009b). For simulating the proposed
method, a two lane street with lane width of 4 m and beacons
height of 5 m are considered. It is assumed that beacon
positions and street or lane width are transmitted to the vehicle
by the beacons. The packet broadcast period, Δt, is assumed to
be 10 ms and α is set to 9.1366 m. This specific value of α is
chosen in such a way that leads to β(x)≥0. Receiver time tag
quantization error is 1/180 µs. Constant K is set to 105 m3/s4to
bring the correlation peak to an order of magnitude below the
arbitrary limit of 100. The maximum of G(t) within this
situation is calculated, 86.52, and ±80% of this amount is
considered for threshold of peak detection. The performance of
the algorithm is evaluated for different speeds from 10 to 110
kph. For each speed, 5000 trials are simulated. For each trial,
the vehicle clock drift is considered as a random number
between -20 and +20 ppm. The error in the odometer-based
speed is considered as a zero mean Gaussian random variable
with Standard Deviation (STD) of 1 m/s. Also it is assumed
that the vehicle has a random smooth movement along the
street, within its lane during the trip. A moving average of
odometer-based measured speed is used as the current speed of
the vehicle. Figure 7 shows the vehicle passage detection rate
and true lane detection rate. As can be seen, the vehicle
detection rate is almost constant and about 95% for different
speeds. This rate could be increased by lowering the threshold
assigned for correlation peak detection at the cost of decreasing
the accuracy of estimated passage time. The lane of the vehicle
is almost always detected truly for lower speeds but for the
speeds over 40 kph , the performance begins to decline. The
estimate of the vehicle position when the correlation peak
detected is xd= α along the street. Due to the estimated
acceleration error and odometer noise, the estimated vehicle
detection time is erroneous and as a result, the estimated
position of the passing vehicle is not its real position. Figure 8
shows the STD of the error of estimated position along the
street when the vehicle passes through the beacons. As can be
seen, the estimated position error increases when speed is
higher.
V. CONCLUSION
A vehicle counting and lane detection technique is
proposed. The presented technique works based on DSRC
packets broadcast by two beacons with a known fixed period.
The proposed method relies on time tags of received packets.
The beacons periodically broadcast packets including the
required data for the vehicle. The main process is carried out
in the vehicle. The vehicle estimates its lane and passage time.
The result can be transmitted in one packet to a beacon or a
control center near the beacons for ITS purposes. The main
contributions of this work are i) a new approach for traffic
flow monitoring ii) instant lane detection useful for some
applications such as traffic guidance and traffic signal control.
The estimated position of the vehicle, when passing through
the beacons, can be used for positioning enhancement
purposes. The advantage of this method is implementation on
a vehicular communication platform. A method for routes with
more lanes, improving the lane detection rate for high speeds,
and position tracking systems based on detected lane are
considered as future work.
Figure 7. Vehicle detection rate for different speeds
Figure 8. STD of estimated position of the passing vehicle
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