IoT-Assisted Low-Cost Traffic Volume Measurement and Control

Efficient management of traffic at road-junctions is a very significant component of a smart-city system. Efficient measurement of the waiting traffic volume at the road-junctions over different roads / lanes is a fundamental step towards that. Existing traffic-measurement strategies either depend on manual intervention or exploit sophisticated equipment and necessary complex arrangements to accomplish the task. However, such arrangements are not only costly but also difficult to install and maintain. The execution of such systems also consume high network bandwidth, as well as they are not easily integrable with a smart-city system in general. Moreover, any outdoor system is always prone to sudden physical disruptions due to various natural calamity and other similar reasons. Due to complexity and cost, re-installation of the existing traffic-measurement systems takes substantial time and effort. In this work we propose an IoT-assisted low-cost and easy-to-install traffic-measurement strategy as an alternative to the traditional approach. Through the analysis of outdoor traffic measurement data we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed strategy. Finally we also build a traffic-control mechanism to demonstrate how the proposed measurement strategy can be exploited for dynamic-time slicing based control policy.