Safety warning based on highway sensor networks

Abstract

We propose a novel vision for highway safety warning based on sensor networks; the system aims to provide user-friendly zero-delay safety warnings to motorists. Our idea leverages advanced sensing, networking and storage technologies. Highway sensors detect events and store event records at multiple designated locations such that passing drivers can be alerted to potential dangers or traffic delays through wireless communication among sensors deployed at the highway and in vehicles. We have designed a location-centric storage protocol which manages the propagation and storage of event records based on the time needed to clear the event in the highway. This protocol ensures that event records can be fairly distributed among highway sensors when event arrival rate is Poisson distributed with the same mean, as verified by our simulation study and theoretical performance analysis.