¡@

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) provide an economical, convenient alternative solution to existing traffic monitoring systems, such as video recognition and inductive loops. However, there are many technical challenges in on-road real-time traffic information collection with WSN, e.g. accurate vehicle detection in low Signal-Noise-Ratio (SNR) conditions and reliable vehicle speed calculation. In this paper we propose a systematic solution to on-road real-time traffic monitoring with a magnetic sensor network. We propose a Similarity Based Vehicle Detection (SBVD) algorithm to detect vehicles in low SNR conditions by calculating the similarity between on-road signals and a referential signal. We propose a Collaborative Speed Calculation (CSC) mechanism to calculate vehicle speed reliably by redundant nodes and accurate reports of vehicle appearance. The CSC mechanism can calculate vehicle speeds accurately and trustworthily. We demonstrate through simulations and experiments that our proposed solution works effectively in noisy on-road environments. The vehicle detection rate is above 90% while no false alarm occurs and the error rate of speed calculation is under 10%.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks, traffic monitoring, magnetic sensor, vehicle detection, speed calculation

Retrieve PDF document (201107_17.pdf)

Received February 8, 2010; revised May 25 & July 13, 2010; accepted July 29, 2010.
Communicated by Rong-Hong Jan.
^* This work was supported in part by the National Basic Research Program of China under Grant No. 2006- CB303000, Beijing Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. 4092045, National &T Major Project under Grant No. 2009ZX03006-001, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China ¡§NSFC¡¨ (Grant No. 61003292).
⁺ Corresponding author, Tel: (8610)62600724, E-mail: wangrui@ict.ac.cn.