LiTMaS: Live road traffic maps for smartphones

Abstract

A smartphone application that displays a live view of road traffic can provide drivers with real-time information on traffic jams, flash floods or accidents along their planned routes. This information aids them in avoiding delays and uncertainties on the road, enhancing their navigation experience. Several US departments of transportation provide information from street cameras in the form of a snapshot of a particular location on a Google map. However, it is difficult for drivers to manually select cameras on the map to obtain consolidated information about road conditions along a particular route. In this paper, we design an energy-efficient mobile service that provides drivers with a convenient interface to observe live camera coverage along a route. Our proposed solution comprises an Android application and a cloud-based proxy service between smartphones and traffic cameras. The proxy provides an abstraction layer over different communication protocols adopted by traffic cameras, and transfers camera images for a specified route to the smartphone as a batch, thereby reducing communication overhead and improving user response time. By employing an in-memory cache, the proxy server maintains the most recently accessed camera images and reduces camera polling. We integrate our solution with traffic cameras from cities in Massachusetts, New York, and Washington DC, and demonstrate its reduced energy consumption and reduced response time.