  Estimation of road traffic is a fundamental problem which has been addressed
with a variety of methods. In the present paper, a variant of the mobile
observer method is proposed. It is assumed that some vehicles composing the
road traffic are communicating vehicles. These communicating vehicles broadcast
periodically beacon messages. The proposed method uses only these beacon
messages as input data, and needs no additional equipment such as radar or GPS
device in order to estimate the road traffic. The model is tested with the
bi-directional simulation framework VEINS, which combines a microscopic road
traffic simulator and a communication simulator. The preliminary results show
the potential of the method and confirm the validity of the approach.
