A Study on the Used of Bluetooth Detectors at a Fix Location for Vehicle Speed Estimation

Usage of Bluetooth for traffic monitoring has been widely researched and well understood. By placing a Bluetooth detector at each end of a segment of a road; the time difference when a Bluetooth device, traveling in a vehicle through that segment, is observed by these detectors is taken to be the time taken by the vehicle to travel along that known segment. The known distance between the detectors and the time it takes to traverse this distance makes it possible to estimate the average speed of the vehicle along that segment. The possibility of estimating the average speed of vehicles within the radio range of a Bluetooth detector, however, has not be carried out until now. The premise of this research is to determine the time a Bluetooth device takes to traverse through the radio range of a detector and from this estimation of the speed of the vehicle traveling through the radio range of the detector. The usage of multiple detectors at the same point to improve the accuracy of the estimates is also investigated. The results of our experiments and what is need to realise such a system are discussed