A Network Tomography Approach for Traffic Monitoring in Smart Cities

Traffic monitoring is a key enabler for several planning and management activities of a Smart City. However, traditional techniques are often not cost efficient, flexible, and scalable. This paper proposes an approach to traffic monitoring that does not rely on probe vehicles, nor requires vehicle localization through GPS. Conversely, it exploits just a limited number of cameras placed at road intersections to measure car end-to-end traveling times. We model the problem within the theoretical framework of network tomography, in order to infer the traveling times of all individual road segments in the road network. We specifically deal with the potential presence of noisy measurements, and t…