The Channel as a Traffic Sensor: Vehicle Detection and Classification based on Radio Fingerprinting

Ubiquitously deployed Internet of Things (IoT)- based automatic vehicle classification systems will catalyze data-driven traffic flow optimization in future smart cities and will transform the road infrastructure itself into a dynamically sensing Cyber-physical System (CPS). Although a wide range of different traffic sensing systems has been proposed, the existing solutions are not yet able to simultaneously satisfy the multitude of requirements, e.g., accuracy, robustness, cost-efficiency, and privacy preservation. In this paper, we present a novel approach, which exploits radio fingerprints - multidimensional attenuation patterns of wireless signals - for accurate and robust vehicle detection and classification. The proposed system can be deployed in a highly cost-efficient manner as it relies on off-the-shelf embedded devices which are installed into existing delineator posts. In a comprehensive field evaluation campaign, the performance of the radio fingerprinting-based approach is analyzed within an experimental live deployment on a German highway, where it is able to achieve a binary classification success ratio of more than 99% and an overall accuracy of 93.83% for a classification task with seven different classes.