Traffic Counting and Turning Fraction Estimation using Vehicle-to-UAV Co-operative communication

The current roads and supporting infrastructure are often found to be incapable of handling the rapid increase in traffic, leading to congestion and incidents. The availability of accurate and real-time information about the traffic demands may go a long way in designing better traffic control and management systems. Two important quantities of interest for traffic control are the ‘traffic count’ on road segments between junctions and ‘turning fractions’ at the junctions. Together, these two quantities can determine the traffic flow requirements over the road network. The aims of the paper are to investigate the performance of the Vehicle-to-UAV (V2U) communication method for traffic counting and turning fraction estimation using vehicular network simulations and compare with the performance of Bluetooth and loop detectors.