Intelligent Guardrails: An IoT Application for Vehicle Traffic Congestion Reduction in Smart City

This paper discusses vehicle traffic congestion which leads to air pollution, driver frustration, and costs billions of dollars annually in fuel consumption. Finding a proper solution to vehicle congestion is a considerable challenge due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the network topology of vehicular environments, especially in urban areas. Recent advances in sensing, communication and computing technologies enables us to gather real-time data about traffic condition of the roads and mitigate the traffic congestion via various ways such as Vehicle Traffic Routing Systems (VTRSs), electronic toll collection system (ETCS), and intelligent traffic light signals (TLSs). Regarding this issue, an innovative technology, called Intelligent Guardrails (IGs), is presented in this paper. IGs takes advantages of Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular networks to provide a solution for vehicle traffic congestion in large cities. IGs senses the roads' traffic condition and uses this information to set the capacity of the roads dynamically.