An important aspect in improving public transport efficiency is collecting information regarding travelers’ routes, usually represented as an Origin Destination (OD) matrix. Most public transportation systems implement fare ollection systems that can provide the accurate origins of travelers’ routes but not accurate destinations. In this paper we look at Wi-Fi, more specifically 802.11 data-link layer, as a candidate to provide OD matrix estimations.

We present a system and an algorithm capable of collecting information regarding Wi-Fi capable devices inside the bus complemented with positioning and time. A system is also presented to implement this concept using minimal requirements.

An implementation of this system was deployed in a public bus to collect data for several weeks. This resulted on over 15000 traveler routes collected in 9 different days. This data was contextualized and mapped to an OD system in order to demonstrate how it can be used to generate OD matrix estimations.