A closed-loop control architecture of UAV and WSN for traffic surveillance on highways

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Excessive speed is the leading cause of accidents on highways. The use of fixed road-side surveillance systems has proven ineffective because people take caution around only those locations. With more advanced technologies and exceptional maneuvering capabilities, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a promising candidate for real-time monitoring of vehicles on the highways. The dependency of recently proposed UAV-based architectures on terrestrial networks suffers from high deployment costs. To address this shortcoming, we propose a unique closed-loop control architecture for traffic surveillance on highways that increases the surveillance effectiveness and adapts according to varying traffic patterns. The proposed scheme is comprised of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and UAV, named Collaborative Highway Surveillance (CHS), that works without human intervention and enables the capture of over-speeding drivers on a highway. The WSN provides routing services to the UAV and dynamically guides UAV to the best hotspot to position itself. If any vehicle exceeds the speed limit allowed, the UAV immediately informs this event to the Mobile Base Station (MBS). However, to conserve the energy resources of the WSN, low-level speed violations are forwarded to the MBS only when the UAV gets closer to the MBS. Performance results obtained with our proposed architecture show an increase in surveillance efficiency with an improved response time compared with cooperative and stand-alone unguided UAV networks.