Patent ID: 7979198

Claim:
A method of monitoring vehicular traffic comprising: receiving at a given vehicle a packet wirelessly broadcast from a nearby vehicle, wherein the packet contains at least (i) identification data including an identifier of the nearby vehicle, (ii) a location of the nearby vehicle, (iii) a direction of travel of the nearby vehicle, and (iv) a counter value; upon receipt of the packet, determining if the given vehicle is not already identified in the packet and if the given vehicle is traveling in substantially the same direction as the received packet indicates the nearby vehicle is traveling, and, only if so, (A) incrementing the counter value, adding an identifier of the given vehicle to the identification data so as to establish modified identification data, and then wirelessly broadcasting a next packet containing at least (i) the modified identification data, (ii) a location of the given vehicle, (iii) a direction of travel of the given vehicle, and (iv) the incremented counter value, and (B) transmitting to the nearby vehicle an acknowledgement of the received packet; and transmitting a reporting packet via a radio access network to a traffic monitoring server, wherein contents of the reporting packet are usable by the traffic monitoring server as a basis to determine vehicular traffic.