A Study of Wireless Sensor Networks for Urban Traffic Monitoring: Applications and Architectures

With the constant increasing of vehicular traffic around the world, especially in urban areas, existing traffic management solutions become inefficient. This can be clearly seen in our life through persistent traffic jam and rising number of accidents. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) based intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have emerged as a cost effective technology that bear a pivotal potential to overcome these difficulties. This technology enables a new broad range of smart city applications around urban sensing including traffic safety, traffic congestion control, road state monitoring, vehicular warning services, and parking management. This manuscript gives a comprehensive review on WSN based ITS solutions. The main contribution of this paper is to classify current WSNs based ITS projects from the application perspective, with discussions on the fulfillment of the application requirements.