IoT approach applied in the context of ITS: monitoring highways through instant messaging

Currently new technology approaches are changing the world in terms of how the people can feel or sense what is happening the whole the time. As regard of this and focusing on the transportation sector, the inhabitants of whatever country wish to know what is happening on the highways, even when they are travelling, in order to be able to take decisions in their routing and timing. There are several systems allow us knowing about the highways and its conditions, a well-known system is waze. However, waze requires a great amount of memory and phone hardware resources and many people do not have the kind of phone terminals that can supports the requirements. In this paper, we present a new way of monitoring taking advantage of an Internet of Things (IoT) approach in order to cooperate with the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In our scope, IoT brings to ITS a composite interconnected system that allows gathering and deploying information like an instant message system for the pedestrians, travelers and drivers. We use two hardware IoT platforms like Raspberry Pi and Intel Edison in order to create an ITS application that provides traffic information about the highways through common instant messaging applications.