A collision free data link layer protocol for wireless sensor networks and its application in intelligent transportation systems

Vehicular networks are the major ingredients of the envisioned Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) concept. An important component of ITS which is currently attracting wider research focus is road traffic monitoring. The actual approaches for traffic road monitoring are characterized by longer response times and are also subject to higher processing requirements and possess high deployment costs. In this paper, we propose a completely distributed and scalable mechanism for wireless sensor network-based road traffic monitoring. The approach relies on the distributed and bidirectional exchange of traffic information between the vehicles traversing the routes and a miniature cluster head and takes into consideration both the security and reliability of data communication. In addition, the communication between nodes is collision free since the underlined data link layer protocol relies on a heuristic time multiplexed-based protocol. The performance analysis shows that the proposed mechanism usually outperforms other algorithms for different traffic densities.