Identification of public transit vehicle arrival with arrival time and dwell time estimation based on crowd-source WI-FI MAC address

The smartphone popularity and internet connection demand have been dramatically increased. Wi-Fi network became to be widespread to response the growing demand. This research aims to study the possibility of utilizing the Wi-Fi enabled smartphones as opportunistic sensors for the benefits of public transportation system development. An empirical study was conducted to understand the nature of smartphone Wi-Fi broadcasting behaviour. The behaviour then became basic knowledge for the proposed public transit vehicle identification algorithm. The algorithm was evaluated by a set of MAC addresses captured from a sky train station in Bangkok using a Wi-Fi sniffing program. The proposed methodologies are capable to identify the arrival of public transit vehicles. More robust estimation algorithms need to be developed to estimate more precise vehicle arrival time and dwell time affected by the unpredictable characteristics of smartphone Wi-Fi broadcasting behaviour. The vehicle identification based on Wi-Fi MAC address can be widely extended in the future researches.