Minimum-Cost Implementation of Traffic Information System over Wireless Mesh Network

As the traffic situations on highways and streets become more variable and more complex every day, the deployment of a traffic information system (TIS) becomes inevitable. In this paper, we develop an advanced wireless mesh architecture for TIS (WMTIS) which provides vehicles with the least delay routes to their destinations. The contributions of the paper are twofold. First, we propose an efficient communication framework for a TIS based on wireless mesh networking, i.e., WMTIS, and shed light on the mechanisms and the functional elements of WMTIS that are required to be deployed over the wireless mesh topology in order to support traffic applications. The performance improvements of WMTIS over fully ad-hoc TISs are verified via simulations. Second, we propose an approach to minimize the deployment cost of WMTIS while keeping the round trip delays of traffic information messages below the maximum tolerable delay in traffic applications. We use simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cost minimization approach.