A Survey on Using Wireless Signals for Road Traffic Detection

With the advent of wireless technologies, it has been found that using wireless signals for the purpose of vehicular traffic management is the most cost effective process as wireless signature are available across all terrains and it is ubiquitous. As the road space is not expanding in line with the growth of automobiles, traffic congestion is bound to increase on a regular basis. The only way to avoid vehicular congestion is to have a regulated traffic movement plan in a real time basis. During the last decade, a number of methods were developed to obtain real time data on vehicle movements such as using RFID, Wireless Sensor Networks, VANETs, Mobile Technologies, Infrared signals, Cameras etc. A number of studies have been carried out to find out optimum vehicle traffic management to predict and manage traffic congestion and these studies have its own merits and demerits .Most studies have not been conclusively proved to be effective to address the issues concerned with road traffic management because of implementation difficulties, data inaccuracies, difficulty in real time application and cost. This is causing serious safety concerns in traffic management because of the tremendous growth in the number of vehicles and the non-availability of effective traffic management system. This paper is a comparative study of existing methods for detecting vehicular traffic density by using wireless signals.