Patent ID: 7546128

Claim:
A method for determining traffic velocities along a plurality of traffic routes by using operational data associated with mobile stations operating in a wireless telephony communications network overlapping the traffic routes and comprising a cell sector coverage area having a plurality of cell sectors, comprising the steps of: generating a plurality of traffic data records based on the operational data from the wireless telephony communication network, each traffic data record identifying a location within the wireless telephony communication network for one of the mobile stations at a particular time; generating a movement record in response to processing at least two of the traffic data records associated with a wireless communication activity by a same one of the mobile stations, each movement record comprising locations within the wireless telephony communication network for the same mobile station at different times and reflecting movement by the same mobile station; creating a plurality of traffic routes between any two of the cell sectors by processing cell sector coverage area information for the wireless telephony communications network and geographic information for roadways within the cell sector coverage area of the wireless telephony communications network; identifying from the plurality of traffic routes a particular one of the traffic routes traveled by a vehicle associated with one of the mobile stations by processing the movement records for the mobile station, comprising the steps of: identifying a set of cell sectors from a polyline of locations associated with the movement records for the same mobile station; for each set of cell sectors, determining all of the routes that traverse the cell sectors in the cell sector set; calculating a cell handoff score for each route traversing the cell sector set; eliminating any of the traffic routes that are not within an acceptable range of the handoff scores; calculating a velocity along each traffic route that are not eliminated by the handoff score using time stamps in the movement record; trimming each traffic route for which a velocity was calculated in the event that the calculated velocity exceeds a maximum velocity cutoff; eliminating any traffic routes for which a velocity was calculated in the event that the calculated velocity exceeds the maximum velocity cutoff and the traffic route cannot be trimmed; eliminating any traffic route for which a velocity was calculated in the event that the calculated velocity is less than a minimum velocity cutoff; calculating a z-score of the calculated velocity for all of the remaining ones of the traffic routes that not been eliminated; and selecting the particular traffic route from the remaining traffic routes based on the z-score of the calculated velocity and the handoff score; and calculating an estimate of a velocity of vehicular traffic along the particular traffic route by using the movement records associated with the particular traffic route.