A Way to Measure and Analyze Cellular Network Connectivity on the Norwegian Road System

The quality of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is a highly relevant aspect for the successful adoption of Intelligent Transportation Systems. In this paper, we present our plans to collect connectivity-related data on the Norwegian road network on a big scale. For that, a fleet of transporters will be equipped with Android devices sensing relevant connectivity data like the signal strength of cellular networks or the round trip delay of messages sent from a device to a remote server and back via these networks. The retrieved data are then stored together with the GPS data of the location where the measurements were taken. Data collected at the same place during various tours are aggregated, and the resulting data set can be used for various kinds of analysis and prediction. We introduce the architecture of our Android-application. Moreover, we discuss the results of some first experiments taken during various tours in a sparsely populated area around Trondheim. In particular, we found out some interesting correlations between the signal strength and the round trip delay which are quite different depending on the communication protocols used.