Nanosensors for traffic condition monitoring

Abstract With the increased need for mobility and the overcrowding of cities, the area of intelligent transportation aims at improving the efficiency, safety, and productivity of transportation systems by relying on communication and sensing technologies. One of the main challenges faced in intelligent transportation systems pertains to the real-time collection of traffic- and road-related data, in a cost-effective, efficient, and scalable manner. The current approaches still suffer from problems related to the energy consumption of mobile devices and overhead in terms of communications and processing. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we propose in this paper a novel infrastructure-less on-demand vehicular sensing framework that provides accurate road-condition monitoring, while reducing the number of participating vehicles, energy consumption, and communication overhead. Our approach is adopting the concept of mobile sensing as a service, in which mobile owners participate in the data-collection activities and decide to offer the sensing capabilities of their phones as services to other users.