A Wi-Fi based Electronic Road Sign for Enhancing the Awareness of Vehicle Driver

Abstract

Reducing the road accident rate is one of the city goal in the area of transportation. One of the effort to reach that goal is done by deploying various signs across the road. However, the role of those road signs can be diminished once the vehicle drivers intentionally or unintentionally disobey the rule indicated on those signs. In order to increase the awareness of the driver, we can employ the vehicular network concept in which a vehicle can communicate with another vehicles or with the infrastructure installed along the road. For realizing that idea, we propose the implementation of communication equipped road sign system which consists of two components: Road Side Unit (RSU) module deployed at road sign and On Board Unit (OBU) module deployed at each vehicle. In our proposed scheme, both of the devices communicate each other through the widely-used Wi-Fi protocol (IEEE 802.11n) operating in ad-hoc mode. While a OBU equipped vehicle is moving towards the communication range of RSU, it will make an association to a predefined wireless ad-hoc network. Once it is associated, the OBU can receive message broadcast by the RSU. Upon reception, OBU display alert message indicating that the vehicle is approaching a road sign. From performance testing we observe that the proposed system can give relatively good service the vehicle moving as fast as speed 90km/h with the distance as far as 90m.