Comparison between Floating Car Data and Infrastructure Sensors for Traffic Speed Estimation

The development of new generation Intelligent Vehicle Technologies will enable a better level of road safety and CO2 emission reductions. However, the bottleneck of all of these systems is the need of a comprehensive and reliable data. For traffic data acquisition, two sources are available today: infrastructure sensors and floating vehicles. The first ones consist on a set of static underground sensors installed in the roads; the second ones consist of the use of intelligent vehicles as mobile sensors. Both of them make use of different communication systems, V2V, V2I and I2I. In this paper we present a comparison of the performance of both kinds of traffic data source for road traffic speed estimation. A set of real experiments has been performed in several traffic conditions, using infrastructure sensors and the information retrieved by one instrumented intelligent vehicle. After processing these data, the results show the better accuracy of the floating cat data as well as its low cost in the case of a massive implantation.