Novel Model for Vehicle’s Traffic Monitoring using Wireless Sensor Networks between Major Cities in South Africa

With the growing number of vehicles and users, monitoring road and traffic within cities is becoming a huge research challenge. With the urban scale enlargement coupled with the exponential growth in the number of vehicles, South Africa (SA) is not an exception. Consequently, congestion and pollution (i.e. noise and air) have become the order of the day. Road congestion and traffic-related pollution are well-known for huge negative socio-economic impact on several economics worldwide. For over a decade now, the number of cars on SA roads has increased tremendously and the road transport profile is characterized by its sizeable and total dependence on cars particularly in the highly developed urban areas alongside cycling, and other public transport. This has brought about increasing congestion in public roads which poses a serious problem not only for SA, but many countries of the world and has to be contained. Several solution methods have been proposed requiring dedicated hardware such as GPS devices and accelerometers in vehicles or camera on roadside and near traffic signals. Most other works in literature concentrated on lane system and orderly traffic, which is common in developing world and in some cases, the traffic is highly chaotic and unpredictable. The situation in SA cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria are not different. All there methods are costly and human require much effort. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel model that is cost effective, requires less human intervention, but uses wireless sensor networks application to monitor traffic in major SA cities.