Supporting augmented floating car data through smartphone-based crowd-sensing

Over the last few years, academia, governmental agencies, automotive and electronic industries have increased their interest in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and services. The leading European ITS stakeholders are pushing to start a few “day-one” applications in 2015. Among them, the collection of Floating Car Data (FCD) generated by moving vehicles is expected to support many practical use cases in a near future, such as road safety provision, in-vehicle diagnostics, and traffic monitoring. This paper shows that consumer devices on the mass market (such as smartphones) and available networking technologies (such as Wi-Fi and cellular) can compensate for the current lack of dedicated equipment and mature vehicular communication technologies. The proposed SmartCar (SMARTphone-based floating CAR data collection) platform gives a twofold contribution to the efficient support of early ITS applications on a large-scale through: (i) an intelligent use of smartphones to collect “augmented” FCD from in-vehicle telematics and external sensors (e.g., pollution detectors for urban sensing), and (ii) the adoption of an offloading strategy that leverages Wi-Fi hotspots to alleviate the burden on the cellular network due to the massive generation of “augmented” data. The technological feasibility of SmartCar for augmented FCD gathering and remote transfer is demonstrated through a prototype, preliminarily experimented on board the vehicle and based on low-cost off-theshelf hardware and open-source software. Results from preliminary field trials are collected, whereas the effectiveness of offloading at a large-scale is further assessed by a simulation campaign under realistic settings.