A Public Transportation Monitoring System Using IEEE 802.11 Networks

One major challenge today is to deal with the traffic jams related to excessive use of vehicles. It is believed that more people would adopt public transportation if these were more reliable. Thus, this paper proposes WiBus, which is a system to estimate buses times of arrival, based on information from opportunistic contacts in IEEE 802.11 networks. Estimates are provided to users through graphical interfaces of mobile devices. WiBus adjusts bus trajectories with an algorithm for dynamic creation and maintenance. The system was implemented and its performance was analyzed via emulation of a real scenario. Experimental results show that WiBus can meet demands of large cities with accumulated error on the order of a few minutes in the worst case.