Deriving vehicle speeds from standard statistics of mobile telecom switches

Telematics typically utilizes vehicle detectors and Global Positioning System (GPS)-based vehicle probes to compute the speeds of vehicles. When the detectors and the GPS probes are not available, vehicle speeds can be estimated by the cellular floating vehicle data technique, where the telecom network needs to spend extra effort to identify specific users and track their movements. This paper proposes the Speed Determination (SD) Algorithm, which uses standard statistics of telecom switches to compute the speeds of vehicles without extra effort in the telecom network. Simulation and field measurements indicate that the SD Algorithm can effectively report the vehicle speeds of two-way roads.