Executive Summary

Wireless Sensor Networks are envisaged to be prevalent in a myriad of application scenarios in the foreseeable future due to the benefits they offer chiefly low cost, low power operation, self configuration etc. They can be utilized in industrial environments to gather data about different parameters such as temperature, humidity, voltage etc or in military applications to accumulate data related to a certain terrain due to their ease of deployment.

The project proposes to use wireless sensors to amalgamate and utilize data in order to measure the road traffic congestion in urban areas and then investigate, propose and implement the most appropriate queuing algorithms from communication theory to regulate traffic and ease the congestion in traffic hotspots during busy hours. The decisions are to be made in real time based on allocation of queuing priorities to each lane following a certain criteria. RFID tags are to be used to store data using a unique identifier about each vehicle and its owner. The RFID tags are to be read by RFID readers through a wireless air interface and the data about the user is to be validated and compared with a local/centralized database. Different levels of security triggers can thus be defined and used basing upon the acquired information.

The main research challenges related to the implementation consist of determining not only the number of vehicles in a certain lane but also identifying the particular lane and the direction of the vehicle. Multi-channel/Multi-radio communications with the appropriate dynamic channel allocation techniques will be investigated to resolve this issue. The complexity of the selected queuing theory algorithm and its hardware implementation is going to be thoroughly evaluated as well. The proposed idea and its implementation will not only resolve traffic congestion issues to a large extent but will also assist in automating the vehicles scrutiny wirelessly and autonomously instead of increasing the number of checkpoints that aggravates the traffic congestion thereby creating further traffic bottlenecks. Any anomalies detected in the information acquired from the vehicle by comparing it with the centralized database shall activate the relevant security triggers to thwart any possible security threats.