Implementation of novel vehicles' traffic monitoring using wireless sensor network in South Africa

The road transport profile in the highly developed urban areas in South Africa (SA) is characterized by sizeable and total dependence on cars. For over the years now, the amount of vehicles users on SA roads has increased enormously and is becoming a major concern to transportation specialists and decision makers. At present there is no automatic system available for vehicle traffic monitoring and congestion avoidance in SA. The existing methods for traffic management, surveillance and control are not adequately efficient in terms of performance, cost, maintenance, and support. In this paper, we present the results of the implementation of our novel model for vehicles traffic monitoring using wireless sensor network between two major cities in South Africa namely Johannesburg and Pretoria. Our novel model uses a wireless sensor network (WSN) as an instrument to control traffic signals along the roadsides, while the RFID scanner is used to identify vehicles in the congestion areas so that the traffic officer at the Traffic Monitoring Centre (TMC) can make use of Global Positioning System (GPS) by establishing the position of the vehicle at any point on the roads and to determine the appropriate roads for motorists.