WiTraffic: Low-cost and Non-intrusive Traffic
Monitoring System Using WiFi
Myounggyu Won1 , Shaohu Zhang1 , and Sang H. Son2
1 WENS
Lab, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD, United States
2 CPS Global Center, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Daegu, South Korea
{myounggyu.won,shaohu.zhang}@sdstate.edu, son@dgist.ac.kr
Abstract—The traffic monitoring system is an imperative tool
for traffic analysis and transportation planning. In this paper,
we present WiTraffic: the first WiFi-based traffic monitoring
system. Compared with existing solutions, it is non-intrusive,
cost-effective, and easy-to-deploy. Unique WiFi Channel State
Information (CSI) patterns of passing vehicles are captured
and analyzed to effectively perform vehicle classification, lane
detection, and speed estimation. A machine learning technique
is adopted to train vehicle classification models and efficiently
categorize vehicles. An Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD)-based
vehicle lane detection algorithm and vehicle speed estimation
mechanism are proposed to further utilize WiFi CSI to identify
the lane in which a vehicle is located and to estimate the vehicle
speed. We implemented WiTraffic with off-the-shelf WiFi devices
and performed real-world experiments with over a week of field
data collection in both local roads and highways. The results show
that the mean classification accuracy, lane detection accuracy for
both local road and highway settings are around 96%, and 95%,
respectively. The average root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the
proposed CSI-based speed estimation method on a highway was
5mph in our experimental settings.
Index Terms—WiFi CSI; Traffic monitoring systems
I. I NTRODUCTION
The traffic monitoring system refers to a set of technolo-
gies that are designed to collect traffic data on the roadway
usage, e.g., the number and characteristics of vehicles. It
plays a vital role in analyzing the transportation system and
establishing plans for future transportation needs [1]. It is an
imperative tool for many state Departments of Transportation
(DOTs) to achieve various purposes, e.g., determination of
road improvement plans, evaluation of the efficiency of road
network, assessment of economic benefits, assistance in new
development plans, and so on [2].
Numerous traffic monitoring systems have been developed.
These systems can be largely classified into three categories:
in-road-based, over-road-based, and aerial-sensor-based ap-
proaches. In-road-based systems require to sawcut the pave-
ment and embed sensors in the pavement of the roadway.
Those sensors include inductive loop detectors [3], and mag-
netometers [4]. However, installing sensors is very time and
labor-intensive, and the operation of those sensors is inter-
vened by roadway surfacing or pavement deterioration. Over-
road-based approaches install sensors (e.g., video cameras [5],
Myounggyu Won and Shaohu Zhang equally contributed to this work.
978-1-5090-2991-4/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
WiFi NIC
WiFi Transmitter
Receiver System
Fig. 1. Illustration of WiTraffic system.
ultrasonic sensors [6]) either above the roadway or alongside
the roadway. These systems are usually costly and easily
affected by weather conditions. Aerial-based approaches [7]
utilize satellites or aircrafts to capture road images, and extract
traffic information via image processing. These solutions,
however, suffer from spatio-temporal limitations.
WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) represents channel
properties of wireless communication links that describe how
signals are transmitted from a transmitter to a receiver. Re-
cently, various CSI-based applications have been developed,
e.g., human activity recognition [8][9][10][11], and localiza-
tion [12][13] manifesting the versatility of WiFi CSI. In this
paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation
of the first WiFi CSI-based traffic monitoring system called
WiTraffic and demonstrate that the limitations of existing
traffic monitoring systems are addressed utilizing the rich
context information contained in WiFi CSI.
More specifically, we illustrate that WiFi CSI can be used to
create a multifaceted traffic monitoring system that is capable
of performing vehicle counting, classification, lane detection,
and speed estimation. Distinctive CSI patterns of passing
vehicles are captured and analyzed to fulfill various functions
of the traffic monitoring system. A machine learning technique
is employed to train vehicle classification models based on the
unique CSI values of different vehicle types. The classification
models are utilized to perform effective vehicle categorization.
Additionally, motivated by the observation that each lane has a
unique distribution of CSI data, a novel vehicle lane detection
algorithm is developed that characterizes the distribution of
the CSI data per lane, and performs lane detection based on
the comparison of the probability distributions of CSI using
the Earth Mover’s Distance.
Compared with existing traffic monitoring systems, the
proposed system is non-intrusive, easy-to-deploy, portable,
and inexpensive. Especially, in comparison with RF-based
vehicle detection systems [14][15] that utilize the received
signal strength indicator (RSSI) to detect vehicles, the rich
information of CSI allows for more fine-grained analysis of
signals at the levels of frequency-selective fading and indepen-
dent spatial paths enabling vehicle classification beyond simple
vehicle detection. In addition, while the RSSI could fluctuate
to a few db at the same location [16], CSI is more stable and
robust to the complex environments [17]. All it’s required to
deploy the proposed system is a off-the-shelf WiFi access point
(Internet Connection not necessary) and a WiFi device (such
as a laptop) that receives WiFi signals from the access point
(Figure 1). With this system, anyone can easily deploy a traffic
monitoring system anywhere and perform traffic monitoring
at a low cost, potentially addressing the cost issue for many
state DOTs to deploy a large number of traffic monitoring
systems on rural highways. The contributions of this paper
are summarized as follows.
∙ The first WiFi-based traffic monitoring system is devel-
oped.
∙ Various functionalities of a traffic monitoring system, i.e.,
vehicle detection, classification, lane identification, and
speed measurement are developed based on WiFi CSI.
∙ A machine learning technique is applied to achieve highly
accurate vehicle classification.
∙ A novel vehicle lane detection mechanism is developed
based on the unique CSI distributions of vehicles on
different lanes.
∙ More than a week of real traffic data were collected
from local roads and highways, and extensive real-world
experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance
of the proposed system.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, pre-
liminaries are presented to review CSI and to define basic
terms that are used in this paper. Section III describes an
overview of the proposed system followed by the details of the
system components. In Section IV, the system implementation
details are explained. Section V evaluates the performance of
the proposed system, and in Section VI, the related work is
presented. We conclude in Section VII.
II. P RELIMINARIES
The orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
modulation scheme has been adopted to implement the physi-
cal layer of the current WiFi standards. It divides the channel
into subcarriers, and data is transmitted over these subcarriers.
Using this channel division mechanism, OFDM addresses the
frequency selective fading caused by the multipath effect. CSI
characterizes signal strengths and phases of these OFDM sub-
carriers. More specifically, a received WiFi signal is modeled
as the following [18].
𝑦 = 𝐻 ⋅ 𝑥 + 𝑛,
where 𝑥, 𝑦, and 𝑛 are the transmitted signal, received signal,
and channel noise, respectively. A matrix 𝐻 represents the
frequency response of each subcarrier for all streams, i.e.,
there are 𝑚 × 𝑛 streams if there are 𝑚 receiver antennas,
and 𝑛 transmitter antennas. Thus, the dimension of matrix 𝐻
is 𝑚 × 𝑛 × 𝑤, where 𝑤 denotes the number of subcarriers.
For example, matrix 𝐻 for a certain stream is represented as
a vector of subcarrier groups:
𝐻 = [𝐻1 , 𝐻2 , ..., 𝐻𝑤 ],
where 𝐻𝑖 denotes the 𝑖-th subcarrier group that represents both
the amplitude and phase information as follows.
𝐻𝑖 = ∣ℎ∣𝑒𝑗𝑝 ,
where ∣ℎ∣, and 𝑝 represent the amplitude and phase, respec-
tively. The key idea is that by exploiting the amplitude and
phase information of subcarrier groups, small changes in the
channel usually caused by multipath effects are effectively
captured.
Fig. 2. Illustration of multipath effects caused by a passing vehicle.
The multipath effect caused by passing vehicles, i.e., signals
reflected from the ground and the vehicle body, is utilized
to perform vehicle classification. For example, as shown in
Figure 2, the line of sight (LoS) signal is degraded due to the
vehicle body; paths 𝑝1 and 𝑝2 are reflected from the ground,
and path 𝑝3 is reflected from the vehicle body. Considering the
application-specific characteristics of an outdoor environment
that has significantly lower signal reflections compared with
typical indoor environments with many obstacles, an weighted
average of 30 CSI groups in the frequency domain is utilized
not only to compensate for the small-scale fading effect,
but also to minimize the computational overhead [19]. This
effective CSI is formally defined as follows.
𝐾
1 ∑
𝐶𝑆𝐼𝑒𝑓 𝑓 = 𝑤𝑘 ⋅ ∣𝐻𝑘 ∣,
𝐾
𝑘=1
where 𝑤𝑘 is the weight of the 𝑘th subcarrier, and K is
the number of subcarriers. Here 𝑤𝑘 =𝑓𝑘 /𝑓0 , where 𝑓𝑘 is the
frequency of the 𝑘-th subcarrier, and 𝑓0 is the center frequency.
Normalized effective CSI is converted into the ‘radio-
strength-dependent one’ to more accurately capture the unique
CSI values of vehicles, especially to distinguish vehicles that
are on different lanes exhibiting different power levels of CSI
depending on the distance from the transmitter. Consequently,
CSI power is defined based on effective CSI and AGC (Au-
tomatic Gain Control - obtained from the NIC) as follows.
 (a)
(d)
Fig. 3. Snapshots of a passing (a) motor bicycle; (b) passenger vehicle; (c) truck, and the corresponding CSI values for the (d) motor bicycle; (e) passenger
vehicle; (f) truck.
𝐶𝑆𝐼𝑒𝑓 𝑓
𝑃𝑐𝑠𝑖 = √ 𝐴𝐺𝐶 .
10 10
CSI power is used as the main feature for vehicle classifica-
tion and lane detection. It is experimentally observed that CSI
power effectively represents the unique CSI patterns of passing
vehicles on different lanes. Figure 3 displays the waveforms
of CSI power for a passing motorbike, a passenger vehicle,
and a truck.
III. S YSTEM D ESIGN
In this section, an overview of the proposed system is
presented followed by the details of its components.
A. Overview
Fig. 4. System architecture of WiTraffic.
The system architecture of WiTraffic is depicted in Figure 4.
WiTraffic has three main system modules: Data Collection,
CSI Analysis, and Model Database. The Data Collection
module collects raw CSI data in a sliding window, removes
noise in the collected data, and detects a passing vehicle
based on the noise-removed data. The CSI Analysis module
implements the functions of a traffic monitoring system, i.e.,
vehicle classification, lane detection, and speed estimation, by
performing analysis of the filtered CSI data. The results of
(b) (c)
(e) (f)
data analysis are incorporated into the models in the Model
Database to improve the performance of WiTraffic.
B. Noise reduction
CSI data generated by commodity WiFi NICs are inherently
noisy due to dynamics of transmit power levels, transmission
rates, and internal CSI reference levels. For accurate vehicle
classification, such noise needs to be effectively removed. The
Butterworth low-pass filter is well known for its effectiveness
to reduce noise of CSI data [10]. We adopt the Butterworth
low-pass filter to remove the noise of collected raw CSI data.
We tested the filter with different cut-off frequencies to find
the best configuration and observed that with a normalized cut-
off frequency of 0.05rad/s, the noise was effectively reduced.
Figures 5 and 6 plot measurements of original CSI data and
filtered one for a passenger vehicle and a truck, respectively.
It is illustrated that the noise is effectively removed after
applying the Butterworth low-pass filter. It should be noted
that if we adapt the cut-off frequency depending on the traffic
environment, it is expected that WiTraffic will perform better.
We leave the algorithm development for this dynamic selection
of the cut-off frequency as future work.
C. Vehicle Detection and Classification
Once noise of CSI data is successfully reduced, the vehicle
detection component of the Data Collection module starts
to run to detect a passing vehicle based on the filtered CSI
data. Since passing vehicles cause high variance in CSI data
(Figures 5 and 6), a simple threshold-based detection method
is developed, rather than developing a machine learning algo-
rithm to minimize the system complexity. More specifically,
a CSI power sample 𝑐𝑖 measured at time 𝑡𝑖 is compared
with threshold Δ𝑑. The optimal threshold is experimentally
determined in Section V-B. We selected the threshold such
that the false positive rate is minimized while the vehicle
detection accuracy is maximized. Given the selected threshold,
if the current CSI sample value drops below the threshold, CSI 40 60

values in the corresponding sliding window are input to the 50

30
CSI Analysis module to proceed with vehicle classification, 40

Counts

Counts
lane detection, and speed estimation. 20 30

20
10
0.2 0.25 10
CSI Power Measurment (dBm)

CSI Power Measurment (dBm)

orignal orignal
filtered filtered 0 0
0.2 0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
0.15
CSI bins CSI bins
0.15
0.1
0.1
Fig. 7. Probability distribution of Fig. 8. Probability distribution of
CSI values for a passenger vehicle CSI values for a passenger vehicle
0.05
0.05 on Lane 1. on Lane 2.
0 0
0 500 1000 1500 0 500 1000 1500
Sample Index Sample Index

Fig. 5. Filtered CSI power for a Fig. 6. Filtered CSI power for a truck.
passenger vehicle.
Note that vehicle detection and vehicle classification are two
different functions of the proposed system, i.e., once a vehicle
is detected, vehicle classification is performed to determine the
vehicle type. Rich information extracted from CSI data is used
to train vehicle classification models, and vehicle classification
is performed in accordance with the models. More specificaly,
we employ the C-Support Vector Machine (C-SVM) [20]
to train our vehicle classification models. In this paper, we
create two models, i.e., for passenger vehicles, and for freight
trucks. It is easy to extend the models for more sophisticated
vehicle classification (e.g., SUVs, pickup trucks, mini-vans,
etc.), which we leave as our future work. Features of filtered
CSI data that represent passing vehicles are extracted and input
to the support vector machine to generate the models.
TABLE I
F EATURE T EST R ESULTS
Local Road
Passenger Vehicle
RMS 0.1250
MAD 0.036
MEAN 0.11
1Q 0.061
3Q 0.156
To train our classification models, we used separated sets
of data for training and testing. For training, five features of
CSI data were used: (1) root mean square (RMS), (2) median
absolute deviation (MAD), (3) mean, (4) first quartile, and
(5) third quartile, based on the observation that a passing
vehicle creates high variance in CSI data. As shown in Table
I, the values of these features for passenger vehicles and
trucks in both local roads and highways are distinctively
different indicating usefulness of these features to achieve high
accuracy in vehicle classification. In particular, to select the
best parameters, i.e., 𝐶 and 𝛾, the cross-validation technique
was used [20].
D. Vehicle Lane Detection
Once vehicle classification is completed, WiTraffic identifies
in which lane a vehicle is located. The key intuition is
that each lane has a distinctive probability distribution of
CSI data because of varying distance from the transmitter
that determines the received signal strength. To capture the
distribution of CSI data (for a certain vehicle type), CSI values
are divided into 20 equal-sized bins. Figures 7 and 8 display
the results for a passenger vehicle on different lanes that
exhibit distinct probability distributions of CSI data. A lane
model for each lane is constructed by incorporating a large
amount of ground-truth CSI data that are validated with video
data. This lane model is individually defined for each vehicle
type since different probability distributions are obtained for
different vehicle types.
More specifically, assume that a vehicle of type 𝑣 is deter-
mined. Let a vector 𝐶𝑣 = {𝑐1 , 𝑐2 , ..., 𝑐𝑛 } be the CSI power
of the detected vehicle. Each CSI sample 𝑐𝑖 of vector 𝐶𝑣 is
then mapped to a bin 𝑏𝑙,𝑣 defined for each lane denoted by 𝑙,
i.e., a value within the range [0, 20], is associated with the CSI
𝑐𝑖
sample, more formally, ⌊ 1/20 ⌋ → 𝑏. This operation is repeated
Highway for all ground truth data to create, calibrate, and consolidate
Truck Passenger Vehicle Truck the lane model.
0.043 0.058 0.031
0.01 0.015 0.008 Once lane models are created, the lane detection module
0.039 0.042 0.027 detects in which lane a vehicle is located. More specifically,
0.026 0.004 0.015
0.05 0.065 0.035 when a vehicle passes through the line of sight path between
the receiver and the transmitter, the module compares the prob-
ability distribution of CSI values of the passing vehicle with
the lane models defined for each lane (and for this particular
vehicle type), and determines the lane model that is ‘closest’ to
the probability distribution of the passing vehicle. To perform
this distribution dissimilarity test and detect the vehicle lane,
we employ the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) [21]. The
EMD is a measure of dissimilarities between two probability
distributions. Conceptually, each bin corresponds to a pile of
“earth”. The cost 𝑓 (𝑎, 𝑏) is defined such that a unit cost is
required to move one unit of earth from bin 𝑎 to bin 𝑏. The
EMD measures the minimum cost to convert a histogram to
a target histogram. Thus, lower EMD means that the two
distributions are more highly correlated, indicating that the
vehicle is on this particular lane. The vehicle lane detection
accuracy based on this EMD metric will be evaluated in
Section V-E.

CSI Power
Time
Fig. 9. Illustration of vehicle detection and speed estimation.
E. Vehicle Speed Estimation
CSI data are further utilized to estimate the vehicle speed,
basically implementing all essential traffic monitoring func-
tions based on WiFi CSI. The key idea is simple: the number
of CSI samples collected while a vehicle passes through the
line-of-sight path between transmitter and receiver is used
as an indicator for estimating the speed of the vehicle. We
observe that when the line-of-sight path is interrupted, the
CSI power substantially decreases. Consequently, in order to
estimate the vehicle speed, the first step is to find the beginning
𝑐𝑏 and end 𝑐𝑒 of the CSI time series that represent the time
period for which the vehicle is blocking the line-of-sight path
(Figure 9). To find 𝑐𝑏 , a similar threshold-based approach is
used. Suppose that the vehicle was detected at 𝑡𝑖 , i.e., 𝑐𝑖 was
smaller than the threshold. We then estimate that 𝑡𝑖 is 𝑐𝑏 . Now,
to determine 𝑐𝑒 , a small time window Δ𝑡 is defined. Starting
from 𝑡𝑖 , the degree of variations in the CSI time series in a
time window between 𝑡𝑗 and 𝑡𝑘 is iteratively calculated using
the mean absolute deviation (MAD) denoted by 𝛿𝑗𝑘 . If 𝛿𝑗𝑘 is
smaller than a predefined threshold, 𝑡𝑗 is marked as the end of
the vehicle passing activity. Consequently, the total number of
samples between 𝑡𝑖 and 𝑡𝑗 are counted, which is denoted by
𝑁𝑠 . This total number of samples is used as the main feature
for training our vehicle speed model, i.e., a speed model is
built using a set of pairs (𝑁𝑠 , ground truth speed) for each
vehicle type.
IV. S YSTEM I MPLEMENTATION
We used off-the-shelf hardware to implement the proposed
system. The Dell Precision M4400 integrated with Intel 5300
WiFi NIC was used as the receiver. This laptop had the 2.5GHz
Intel Core Duo processer with 8GB of RAM and ran Ubuntu
14.04.01 with kernel version of Ubuntu-3.13.0-32.57. We used
the TP-Link TL-WR7500 WiFi router as the transmitter which
operated in the 802.11n AP mode with 2.4GHz frequency and
20MHz bandwidth. The modified WiFi NIC driver developed
by Halperin et al. [22] was adopted to collect raw CSI data at
the sampling rate of 1,000 packets per second.
The laptop and router were deployed on the roadside as
shown in Figure 10. In order to collect the ground truth data
to build the models for vehicle classification, lane detection,
and speed measurement, two USB cameras, ELP 2.0mp, were
connected to the laptop and collected video data. In addition,
the Bushnell velocity speed gun was also installed to collect
the ground truth vehicle speed data. More than a week of
real-world field data were collected to prepare a data set for a
large number of passenger vehicles and trucks for the system
evaluation of Wi-Traffic.
Laptop Router
15 m 16 m
Router Laptop
Fig. 10. Experimental setup: local road (left); highway (right).
Given created models, the proposed system was evaluated
in two different roadway environments. Figure 10 depicts the
two test scenarios: the local road (left) and the highway (right).
The local road was selected as our test site to understand the
system accuracy under complex environments in which there
are pedestrians, bicycles, trees, buildings, and so on. In fact,
as it will be shown in Section V, the accuracy for the highway
was higher compared with that for the local road primarily due
to this complexity.
V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
This section evaluates the performance of WiTraffic. The
optimal window size and threshold are experimentally deter-
mined. Based on the determined window size and threshold,
accuracy of vehicle detection, vehicle classification, vehicle
lane detection, and vehicle speed estimation is evaluated.
A. Selection of Window Size
It was observed that CSI values of a vehicle change signif-
icantly when a vehicle crosses through the line-of-sight path
between the transmitter and receiver. Thus, the window size
needs to be determined based on the vehicle body length. The
body length of a general passenger vehicle is around 4.5m. Ac-
cording to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) [23],
the maximum body length of commercial motor vehicles,
trucks, is about 40m. Assuming that the vehicle speed is
typically between 15mph (6.7m/s) and 75mph (33.5m/s), the
maximum time required for a vehicle to cross the line-of-sight
path is between 0.13s and 1.19s, according to the vehicle body
length statistics. Considering the maximum possible time, the
window sizes of 0.05s, 0.1s, 0.2s, and 0.3s were evaluated.
The classification accuracy for passenger vehicles and trucks
in the local road with varying window sizes is depicted in
Figures 11 and 12. The results for passenger vehicles show
that the accuracy increased slightly between the window sizes
of 0.05s and 0.1s, and decreased thereafter. The reason for the
decreased accuracy is that a larger window contains more CSI
values, and thus more irrelevant data are included that affect
the classification process. In case of trucks (Figure 12), the
 1.0 1.0 1 1
TP TP FP
FP FP Accuracy
0.8 0.8 0.8 0.8
FP
Accuracy
Accuracy

Accuracy

Accuracy

Accuracy
0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6

0.4 0.4 0.4 0.4

0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2

0 0 0 0
0.05s 0.1s 0.2s 0.3s 0.05s 0.1s 0.2s 0.3s 0.125 0.12 0.115 0.11 0.105 0.1 0.09 0.055 0.05 0.045 0.04 0.035 0.030.02
Window size Window size Threshold Threshold

Fig. 11. Effect of the window size for Fig. 12. Effect of the window size for Fig. 15. Effect of threshold (local). Fig. 16. Effect of threshold (high-
passenger vehicles (local road). trucks (local road). way).

1.0 1.0
TP TP

0.8
FP
0.8
FP thresholds resulted in higher false positive rates. In other
words, CSI values dropped below the threshold even though
Accuracy

Accuracy

0.6 0.6
there was no passing vehicles since the threshold was set too
0.4 0.4
high. Thus, when the threshold was lowered, the accuracy
0.2 0.2 increased and the false positive decreased. Interestingly, the
0 0 accuracy, however, stopped increasing at certain threshold and
0.05s 0.1s 0.2s 0.3s 0.05s 0.1s 0.2s 0.3s
Window size Window size started to decrease. This result indicates that if the threshold
is too small, some vehicles that do not cause much variation
Fig. 13. Effect of the window size for Fig. 14. Effect of the window size for in CSI values are not detected. Consequently, we selected the
passenger vehicles (highway). trucks (highway).
thresholds for both the local road (0.1125) and the highway
(0.0425) that maximize the accuracy while minimizing the
accuracy increased for all window sizes. The reason can be false positive rates. In particular, the threshold for the highway
explained with the long body length of trucks, i.e., a small- was set a bit smaller than that for the local road because of
sized window did not completely capture the entire CSI values the faster vehicle speed on the highway.
for a truck.
Figures 13 and 14 display the classification accuracy for C. Vehicle Detection Accuracy
passenger vehicles and trucks in a highway environment with
varying window sizes. Compared with the local road case, it
1 1
was observed that the accuracy for passenger vehicles more
sharply decreased for window sizes greater than 0.1s. The 0.8 0.8

reason can be attributed to the fast vehicle speed on the

Accuracy

Accuracy
0.6 0.6
highway. Despite the rapid accuracy decrease for window sizes
of 0.2s and 0.3s, the overall accuracy for smaller windows 0.4 0.4

was slightly greater than the local road case. The reason can 0.2 0.2

be explained with the complex environment of the local road,

e.g., obstacles such as houses, trees, etc. A similar observation
was made for trucks; an increase of about 3% in the accuracy
was obtained compared with the local road scenario.
Given the classification accuracy data for the local road
with varying window sizes, window sizes of 0.1s and 0.3s
were selected for passenger vehicles and trucks, respectively
for the rest of the experiments. Similarly, window sizes of
0.1s and 0.3s were selected for passenger vehicles and trucks,
respectively for the highway environment.
B. Selection of Threshold
Another key system parameter is the threshold Δ𝑑 (Sec-
tion III-C) that is used to detect a vehicle. Recall that when
measured CSI value drops below Δ𝑑, a vehicle is detected.
In this section, we perform experiments to understand the
effect of the threshold and select appropriate thresholds for
both the local road and the highway. Figures 15 and 16
depict the effect of the threshold for the local road and
the highway, respectively. As shown in both figures, larger
0 0
0 100 200 300 400 0 100 200 300 400
Vehicle index Vehicle index
Fig. 17. Detection accuracy for local Fig. 18. Detection accuracy for high-
road. way.
Having determined the appropriate window size and the
threshold, this section evaluates the vehicle detection accu-
racy. More specifically, the accuracy was measured for 400
passing vehicles in both the local road and the highway
environments. Figures 17 and 18 depict the accumulative
average of the detection accuracy for the local road and
the highway, respectively. It was observed that the average
detection accuracy reached 93% and 95% for the local road
and the highway, respectively. Despite the faster vehicle speed
on the highway, the accuracy for the highway was greater
than the local road due mainly to obstacles around the local
road. Another observation was that the accumulative average
accuracy reached its peak value more rapidly in the highway
environment. The reason is similarly attributed to the noise
caused by obstacles like houses and trees around the local
road.

D. Vehicle Classification Accuracy

1 1

0.8 0.8

Accuracy
0.6
Accuracy

0.6

Fig. 23. Lane model for Lane 1 Fig. 24. Lane model for Lane 2
0.4 0.4
(highway). (highway).
0.2 0.2

0
0
0 100 200 300 400 0 100 200 300 400 (Lane 2) dropped more sharply compared with the other lane
Vehicle Index Vehicle Index
(Lane 1).
Fig. 19. Classification accuracy for Fig. 20. Classification accuracy for Figures 23 and 24 depict the two lane models for Lane 1
local road. highway. and Lane 2 of the highway. Similar to the results for the local
road, distinctive distributions were observed for the two lanes.
Once a vehicle is detected, classification is performed to It is worth to mention that we obtain different distributions for
categorize the vehicle type. Similar to the experiments for the different vehicle types because of unique vehicle body lengths
detection accuracy, the classification accuracy was measured and shapes, and it can be easily extended that lane models for
for 400 passing vehicles. The same window size and threshold other types of vehicles are established for higher lane detection
were used for this experiment. Figures 19 and 20 depict accuracy.
the accumulative average of the classification accuracy for
the local road and highway, respectively. WiTraffic quickly 100
converged to the peak classification accuracy of 92% and 80
Local
Highway

Accuracy (%)
96% for the local road and the highway, respectively. It
60
was observed that the complex environment around the local
road not only influenced the vehicle detection accuracy but 40

also the classification accuracy, resulting in the slightly lower 20

classification accuracy for the local road compared with the 0
highway. It was also observed that WiTraffic reached the 1 2
Vehicle Lane
peak classification accuracy more rapidly in the highway
environment. Fig. 25. Lane detection accuracy for local road and highway.

E. Vehicle Lane Detection Accuracy The generated models were used to evaluate the vehicle lane
detection accuracy. Figure 25 depicts the average lane detec-
tion accuracy for a passenger vehicle in both lanes. Regardless
0.5 0.5
of lanes, the average lane detection accuracy was about 90%
0.4 0.4 in both the local road and the highway. It was observed that
the average detection accuracy for Lane 2 (95.34%) was about
0.3
Percent

0.3
3.5% higher than that for Lane 1. The reason is because Lane
Percent

0.2 0.2 2 was close to the access point which interrupted the line-of-
0.1 0.1
sight signal more significantly, thereby having more distinctive
signal patterns. Another observation was that the lane detection
0
0 5 10 15 20
0
0 5 10 15 20 accuracy for the highway was slightly higher compared with
CSI bins CSI bins
the local road due to the environmental factors around the local
Fig. 21. Lane model for Lane 1 (local Fig. 22. Lane model for Lane 2 (local road, e.g., houses, pedestrians, and trees, etc.
road). road).
F. Speed Estimation Accuracy
In this section, the vehicle lane detection accuracy is eval- In this section, the vehicle speed estimation accuracy is
uated. For this experiment, we generated lane models for a evaluated. We adopted the Bushnell velocity gun (model
passenger vehicle. A lane model is individually defined for 101911) to obtain the ground truth speed data. To calibrate
each lane. Figures 21 and 22 depict the two lane models for this device, we compared the vehicle speed measured with
Lane 1 and Lane 2 of the local road, respectively. As shown, the velocity gun to the speed data obtained from the vehicle
the two lane models exhibit clearly different distributions of speedometer. The results indicate that the average error was
CSI values. More specifically, it was observed that CSI values around 1mph. We then trained speed models for passenger
of a vehicle on the lane that was closer to the access point vehicles for the highway.
 80
70
Speed (mph)
60
50
Ground Truth
40 Estimated
30
0 5 10 15
Vehicle Index
Fig. 26. Speed estimation accuracy.
Given the speed models, the vehicle speed was estimated.
The estimated vehicle speed was compared with the ground
truth data measured with the speed gun. Figure 26 depicts
the results for highway. The results show that the root-mean-
square error (RMSE) for the vehicle speed estimation in the
highway was about 5mph. It is worth to note that higher speed
estimation accuracy can be obtained with more sophisticated
vehicle classification models defined for various kinds of
vehicle types.
VI. R ELATED W ORK
The traffic monitoring systems can be largely classified
into three categories: in-road-based, and over-road-based, and
aerial-sensor-based approaches.
A. In-Road-Based Solutions
The in-road-based solutions embed sensors in the pavement
of a roadway. These sensors include inductive loop detectors,
magnetometers, weigh-in-motion sensors, and tape switches.
Loop Detectors: Loop detectors have been the most widely
used sensors for traffic monitoring due to their mature technol-
ogy and large experience base. This well understood technol-
ogy can obtain traffic count, vehicle classification, and vehicle
speed [24][25][3]. Although loop detectors usually provide
accurate results, they are typically very costly to install.
Magnetometers: To improve the vehicle classification ac-
curacy of loop detector-based systems (e.g., for non-axle-based
vehicle classification), magnetometer-based systems were in-
troduced. For instance, Cheung et al. used magnetometers
that were glued to the center of a lane [26]. There are other
solutions that install megnetometers on the roadside [4][27].
Accelerometers: Accelerometer-based approaches are
based on the measurement of vibrations of the pavement when
a vehicle’s wheels move across the accelerometer [28][29].
These solutions are dependent on the accuracy of vehicle
speed measurement. For example, Ma et al. utilized the
magnetometer to measure the vehicle speed [28]. Although
this is less costly solution compared with the loop detectors,
they are difficult to install and have the energy provision
issue.
B. Over-Road-Base Solutions
To address the drawbacks of intrusive approaches, over-
road-based solutions deploy sensors (e.g.,, video image proces-
sors, ultrasonic sensors, radar sensors, and acoustic sensors)
either above or alongside the roadway.
Video based: With the significant progress in computer
vision, the video camera has been a rich source for vehi-
cle detection and surveillance over the last 30 years. The
20
appearance-based methods were developed to detect traf-
fic [5][30][31][32]. Some proposed motion-based approaches
to detect moving vehicles [33][34][35]. Major challenges for
video-based surveillance systems are weather and lighting
conditions, and vehicle occlusion.
Ultrasonic based: Oudat et al. [6] has developed a traffic
monitoring system based on the combination of ultrasonic
ragefinders and multiple infrared temperature sensors. These
sensors are low cost and easy to manage. However, it has low
accuracy for multi-lane low-traffic flows primarily due to its
limited range [36].
RADAR or LIDAR technology-based: Radar and camera
data are typically fusioned to perform vehicle detection in
different fusion levels [37]. Radar is used to locate interest
areas of an image to expedite the image processing speed.
However, these systems are very expensive due to their ad-
vanced processing circuitry.
Infrared Detectors: Active and passive infrared detectors
capture the energy change measured from the road surface in
the absence of a vehicle [2][38].The advantages of infrared
detectors are that they can be operated during both day and
night. Disadvantages are that infrared detectors are sensitive
to inclement weather conditions and ambient light.
Acoustic Sensor-based: A microphone array is used to
collect road-side acoustic signals, and acoustic features are
extracted to perform traffic monitoring [39]. However, these
approaches are easily affected by noise.
C. Aerial-sensor-based
Recently satellite images and drones are used to capture
road images, and extract traffic information via image pro-
cessing [7]. These approaches, however, suffer from spatio-
temporal limitations. The operation time is limited due to
the limited coverage and limited battery power. In addition,
maneuverability and wireless network communication are two
key challenges for UAV-based traffic monitoring systems.
VII. C ONCLUSION
We have presented the WiFi-based traffic monitoring system
that provides essential functionalities of a traffic monitor-
ing system including vehicle detection, vehicle classification,
vehicle lane detection, and vehicle speed estimation. Real-
world experimental results demonstrate that the proposed
system achieves high vehicle classification and lane detection
accuracy in both the local road and the highway settings. The
results further show that the proposed speed estimation method
is promising and can be improved significantly with more
sophisticated vehicle classification models.
 WiTraffic is a suitable solution for roads with low traffic
volumes such as rural highways for which the number of
deployed traffic monitoring systems is limited due to the
cost issue. We hope that the extremely low cost of WiTraffic
will address this cost issue enabling DOTs to deploy a large
number of traffic monitoring systems. Unfortunately, however,
WiTraffic will perform poorly on crowded city highways due
to a large portion of ‘overlapped vehicles’. Our future work is
to extend WiTraffic to make it accurately identify and classify
overlapped vehicles and to perform lane detection and speed
estimation for overlapped vehicles. Another future work is
to improve the performance of WiTraffic by developing new
features based on the amplitude and phase information of WiFi
CSI, and by generating models (i.e., lane/speed models) for
more vehicle classes such as minivans or pickup trucks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported in part by the DGIST R&D
Program of MSIP of Korea (CPS Global Center) and the
Global Research Laboratory Program through NRF funded by
MSIP of Korea (2013K1A1A2A02078326).
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