Calibrating Bus Mobility Data for Bus-based Urban Vehicular Networks

In addition to being one of the primary means of transport, with the advent of sensing and communication technologies, buses belonging to the public transport system have gained a new role in urban centers. They have been applied as a powerful vehicular network that covers an entire city, called BUS-VANET. For the design and validation of solutions for this type of network, the nodes' mobility information is essential. For instance, data from the buses' GPS trajectories can be used to understand the dynamics of encounters between them. This knowledge can be applied to design applications and services for different users, besides providing the necessary information to properly manage this important public transport solution. However, real-world trajectories have several imperfections. In particular, GPS trajectories are heterogeneous, asynchronous, and typically contain a low sample rate. These characteristics impose certain limitations on the use of this dataset in the design of solutions for a BUS-VANET. In this work, we propose a hybrid method of calibrating trajectories based on historical information of trajectories and a road network to overcome these problems. We showed that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art techniques in several perspectives through evaluation with realistic data.