Internet of Vehicles Based Approach for Road Safety Applications Using Sensor Technologies

In this paper, the Internet of Vehicles approach is used to develop a novel low cost sensor based system for road safety applications in intelligent transportation systems. It was found that major hazards that compromise road safety include weather related factors, poor road surfaces and presence of sharp turns. A wireless sensor network based solution consisting of embedded systems for the vehicular clients and infrastructure waypoints is developed for detecting road safety hazards and warning users about potentially hazardous events from causes that include presence of speed bumps, sharp turns and weather related factors of rain and fog. Hazards detected by the embedded systems are conveyed to the user by using the Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication and Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication interfaces developed in this study for inter-vehicle communication and obtaining sensory information from infrastructure waypoints respectively. Accuracy achieved was 88% for speed bump detection, 73.86% for detecting sharp turns and 100% for detection of rain and fog. Communication systems in the designed solution are optimized by reducing the size of packet being exchanged which improves transmission speed, packet losses and congestion on the network. Thus, the designed solution is capable of improving road safety by using an Internet of Vehicles approach.