IPASS: Intelligent pavement signaling System

Traditional radio frequency based wireless communication/ localization suffers from environmental effects such as multipath propagation. We introduce a robust wireless communication methodology which utilizes the physical world itself to convey information. Our proposed intelligent pavement signaling system (iPASS) places irregularities on pavement in order to encode different messages that can be deciphered in real time by an application running on e.g., a phone. iPASS utilizes available accelerometers, e.g., in today´s smartphones, that can detect even small vibrations from the inside of a car that are produced by driving over irregularities on the road. Our feasibility study illustrates that iPASS can successfully decode a 5 bit message using a conventional smartphone when cruising at various speeds.