A Novel LoRaWAn-based Real-time Traffic Analysis Approach for Vehicle Congestion Estimation

Abstract

In densely populated cities, severe vehicle congestion is an obstacle due to the massive increase of vehicles and bottleneck of roads. Traffic congestion brings severe economic and environmental hazards. Although it is hard to eliminate, it can be mitigated by finding the occurrence of the congestion well in advance to initiate appropriate control measures. Accurately estimating traffic speed, travel time, and other external factors is mandatory for forecasting congestion levels in a dynamic road network. In recent years, sensor-based traffic detection technologies have evolved to achieve accuracy and safety in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, some of them need more reliability, have weak usage in different visibility conditions, are hard to set, and have a high cost. Alternatively, modern navigation systems are developed to find the fastest, alternative routes, travel times, and congestion levels for a given source to destination. These systems use Global Positioning Systems (GPS) data to provide the routing information. Due to inaccurate/ inadequate GPS data samples, sometimes these systems may give misleading information. This work presents Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) architecture to overcome the abovementioned limitations. In our proposed case study, we have used the Dragino LoRaWAn Gps sensor (IN865), air quality sensor (MQ135), temperature and humidity sensor (SHT31), and other sensors to extract direct and indirect factors that influence traffic congestion. Haversine formula and hyper-heuristic-based Encoder-Decoder using Gated Recurrent Units with attention mechanism (ED-GRUAT) are used to estimate the segment-based distance, speed, vehicle travel times, and congestion levels. Our case study helps to calculate accurate traffic speed, travel times, and congestion levels.