Extended MULE Concept for Traffic Congestion Monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks are being recently studied to monitor real-time traffic conditions on roads and highways. Idea of using vehicles to convey information from sensors placed alongside roads to the dedicated base stations has also been under scrutiny for some time. In this paper, we argue that a sensor placed on a vehicle instead of a fixed location can effectively sense traffic congestion on the road and report it to the already available WLAN Access Points (APs) instead of the dedicated base stations. This way, instead of deploying series of base stations to collect traffic information, congestion information can be sent over the ISM links between the vehicular sensor nodes and the WLAN APs. This paper investigates, as we call it, the Extended MULE concept by using actual experimental data obtained from the test drives across the city. Our results show that adopting this idea is effective in reporting traffic congestion on the roads.