A Decentralized Traffic Monitoring System based on vehicle-to-infrastructure communications

Current proposals of automated traffic monitoring systems for highways require high investment in terms of installation and maintenance, especially because these systems rely on a central element which is responsible for inferring and disseminating the traffic conditions. This paper presents DTraMS (Decentralized Traffic Monitoring System), a system that monitors and disseminates traffic conditions using a decentralized infrastructure. On board units and road side units do not necessarily need to be interconnected, nor connected to a central computer. These elements exchange information to update their tables that describe the traffic conditions of each route section. Vehicles serve as data mules that disseminate the information, whereas road side units store and combine the information received from them. To validate DTraMS, a prototype was implemented using IEEE 802.11b/g and experiments were performed on the campus of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The comparison of the results obtained with DTraMS and data obtained with a GPS shows that DTraMS is accurate in detecting both the position of the vehicle and on estimating the road condition.