Embedded solution for road condition monitoring using vehicular sensor networks

Abstract

The advantages of vehicular sensor networks over common wireless sensor networks include the possibility to cover wide measurement area using relatively small number of sensor nodes as well as not so strong limitations according device dimensions, weight and power consumption. These attractive features are reason for expansion of vehicular sensor networks for various environmental monitoring tasks - from defects of road surface to air quality in urban areas. The contribution of this paper is a customized embedded device dedicated for monitoring of road surface using microphone and accelerometer sensors as well as collection of meteorogical data for creation of detailed road meteorology maps. Selected hardware and software aspects are discussed and the implementation of previously developed method for road surface monitoring using accelerometer data is presented.