An architecture for traffic incident detection

Abstract

Road and traffic safety can be improved if the drivers have the ability to see further down the road and can be informed of relevant traffic events, including collisions and slow-downs. The recently proposed VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks) are expected to enable both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications. Virtually all the papers published in the literature assume that V2V communications will rely on a strong roadside infrastructure. Unfortunately, the roadside infrastructure, is very likely to be the target of theft, vandalism and other similar activities that will jeopardize their intended functionality. Worse yet, one can easily contemplate a scenario where the roadside infrastructure may be hacked and injected with malicious code, rendering it not only useless but, downright dangerous.However, all the VANET systems proposed thus far are afflicted with serious security and privacy problems. Indeed, the way current systems are set up, the driver of a car that participates in the traffic will not be able to preserve their privacy and may be subject to impersonation or Sybil attacks. The problem stems from the fact that V2V communication can be traced back to an individual car. Even if several pseudonyms are used, detecting the true identity of the driver and, therefore, invading their privacy appears to be unavoidable.In a sharp departure from the common wisdom we propose to look at vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications from a different perspective. Instead of relying on the roadside infrastructure that is vulnerable to attacks, we propose to embed in the asphalt covering the surface of the roads sensor belts. Each belt consists of a collection of pressure sensors, optionally equipped with piezo-electric elements. The belts can detect and interact with passing cars.In this talk we discuss in detail NOTICE our architecture for traffic incident detection and show that it can be easily extended to cover many problems of interest in infotainment and peer-to-peer content delivery. One important application of NOTICE is with planned evaluations when optimal use must be made of available transportation resource.