An IoT based Intelligent Traffic Congestion Control

System for Road Crossings

Pampa Sadhukhan Firoj Gazi
School of Mobile Computing & Communication School of Mobile Computing & Communication
Jadavpur University, India - 700032. Jadavpur University, India - 700032.
email: [email protected] email: [email protected]

Abstract—Traffic congestion is one of the major issues with the Thus, a lot of researchers have paid attention to the traffic
public transportation system in recent time. The traffic conges- congestion issue of public transportation system over the
tion has a negative impact on the productivity, competitiveness past few decades. Various solutions to road traffic conges-
and economic growth of a country. Hence traffic congestion
control has become an important area of research and significant tion detection and traffic management have been proposed
number of solutions to this problem came out of various research in literature by using the information and communication
efforts in the said field over the past few decades. Among these, technologies (ICT) along with internet-of-things (IoT) devices
vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication based approaches cannot to improve the effectiveness of the transportation system.
accurately estimate the density of traffic congestion. On the other Among the existing techniques to address the traffic conges-
hand, the traffic signaling systems having predetermined fixed op-
eration time cannot manage the traffic volume changing over time tion problem, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication based
and thus, long traffic queues are generated at the road crossings. approaches cannot accurately estimate the traffic congestion
To address the above mentioned issue, this paper proposes an condition (i.e., high, medium etc.) as it relies on significant
internet-of-things (IoT) based intelligent traffic congestion control number of estimated traffic density information exchanges
system that dynamically sets the signal operation time based on among the vehicles and also correlating the collected traffic
the measured values of traffic congestion density. Moreover, a
novel technique of measuring the density of traffic congestion density estimates [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The road crossings in
created at the road crossings is also presented in this paper. most of the countries still use traffic signaling systems loaded
Index Terms—traffic congestion, traffic management, vehicle with statically determined fixed operation time, which cannot
queue, ultrasonic sensor node (USN), Wi-Fi. manage the traffic volume varying over time and thus long
traffic queues are generated at the road crossings [8]. We,
I. I NTRODUCTION therefore, propose in this paper an IoT based intelligent traffic
congestion control system to address the above mentioned
Nowadays, the transportation systems are an essential issue. Our proposed traffic congestion control system, at first,
part of human activities. But, transportation infrastructure attempts to measure the density of traffic congestion created
in the urban areas is almost saturated due to the lack of at road crossings by using ultrasonic sensor node (USN) and
land resources and growing number of vehicles on the road. then dynamically sets the signal operation time based on the
Because of this saturation, various traffic-related problems measured values of traffic congestion density.
have been erupted in the urban areas where people need to
move very fast from one place to another. One of the major II. R ELATED W ORK
issues with the public transportation system in recent time is Numerous IoT based traffic congestion monitoring and
traffic congestion. The traffic congestion not only increases management systems have been proposed in literature over
the fuel consumption but also the risk of heart attacks [1]. the past few years. Among these systems, a wireless sensor
Moreover, the traffic congestion delay very badly affects network based framework for collaborative collection, fusion
human activities and thus, slows down the productivity, and storage of city traffic information has been developed by
competitiveness and overall growth of a country. A very well the researchers in [9]. The authors in [9] have shown that the
known technique to address the traffic congestion problem proposed city intelligent transportation system is more flexible
is adding new infrastructure by constructing new roads as and reliable compared to the other existing city transportation
well as improving the existing infrastructure by widening the system. The researchers have provided future research direc-
roads. However, the limited availability of the land resources tion on the emergency response scheme and transport priority
in the urban areas, have made construction of new highway scheme. The researchers in [10] have proposed a framework
or road within the cities is almost impossible. Moreover, the for the road vehicle traffic monitoring via smart phone based
construction of over bridge or tunnel is very expensive and it measurement system and the usage-based insurance (UBI).
has been found that the improvement in infrastructure always The purpose of this proposed framework is to model, predict,
lags behind the increase in traffic. and control the traffic flow. This framework consists of seven
layers, spanning from the physical smart phones and servers

978-1-5386-2459-3/18/$31.00 2018
c IEEE 371
to the overall business model at the top layer. The design of a
modern traffic monitoring system that can optimize the road
traffic flow in order to meet the current and future necessities
for road travel is proposed in [11]. The researchers in [11] have
shown that their proposed system increases the efficiency of
the monitoring process of the road traffic conditions by pro-
viding permanent knowledge of the meteorological parameters
of different zones. In [12], the researchers have developed
a vehicle detection and classification system for low-speed
congested traffic. Their proposed system uses the low-cost
triaxial anisotropic magneto resistive sensor. A novel fixed
threshold state machine algorithm is applied in this proposed
system to detect vehicles within a single lane and also to
segment the vehicle signals effectively based on the time of
vehicles entry and exit into the sensor monitoring area.
The researchers in [13] have proposed an intelligent traffic
congestion monitoring measurement system called Traffic-
Monitor to measure the real time road traffic congestion by
using RFID reader, wireless router, wireless coordinator and
GSM technology. The proposed system uses a probe vehicle at
which a RFID tag is attached. The probe vehicle measures the
level of traffic congestion from its speed over a stretch of road
and its average waiting time at the road crossing. To calculate
the speed of the probe vehicle and its average waiting time
at road crossing, a wireless router and a wireless coordinator
Fig. 1. Architecture of proposed traffic congestion control system
are deployed across the stretch of road which is 200 meters
long. The central monitoring system receives real time traffic
congestion scenario from the wireless coordinator via GSM locally, i.e., it cannot provide city wise congestion control
modules attached to both central monitoring system as well as report.
wireless coordinator. The use of probe vehicle for each part of The prototype of an intelligent traffic congestion control
road between two junctions makes the proposed system very system that uses RFID, Zigbee and GSM module has been
costly. Moreover, the proposed system does not provide any proposed in [16]. In this proposed system, each vehicle must
solution to curb the traffic congestion. be equipped with RFID tag in order to measure the volume
A context-aware approach to monitor real-time road traffic of traffic congestion and also to detect the stolen vehicle via
density and dynamically manage the traffic signals to improve the RFID readers deployed at various parts of the road. The
the traffic efficiency has been proposed in [14]. The proposed proposed system dynamically adjusts green signal duration for
system uses sensor array to sense the traffic density and various a particular road based on measured volume of traffic conges-
environmental conditions and then transmit those information tion to reduce the traffic congestion. It can detect some stolen
to an android phone over the Bluetooth connectivity. The vehicle if that vehicle comes within the range of some RFID
android phone is responsible for collecting traffic density infor- reader deployed at the road and upon detecting such vehicle it
mation for a certain locality and then sending it to the server would send SMS to the police station via the attached GSM
over the Internet. The central server processes and analyzes module. On the other hand, Zigbee transmitter is attached at
those huge traffic data by applying data mining techniques the emergency vehicle and Zigbee receiver is deployed at road
to detect traffic congestion and manages the traffic signals junction to make clearance path of the emergency vehicle
according to the levels of detected traffic congestion. The whenever it approaches the road junction. The major issue
transmission of the traffic density information from android with this proposed system is that the RFID readers deployed
phone to central server over the Internet may take longer than at two sides of some wide road cannot properly measure the
usual time, which in turn reduces the efficiency of proposed traffic volume since the vehicles standing at the middle queues
congestion control mechanism. A prototype of a model to should not come within the range of RFID reader.Because of
reduce the traffic congestion has been presented in [15]. the above mentioned reason, the detection of stolen vehicle
The proposed model attempts to solve the problem of traffic may also fail.
congestion at four way road crossings by sensing the traffic
load on the road using IR sensor and taking the best fitted III. P ROPOSED T RAFFIC C ONGESTION C ONTROL S YSTEM
decision based on the traffic load on the road. However, the The architecture of the proposed system is shown in fig.
detection of traffic load on the road by using IR sensor only is 1 and it consists of two modules. These are traffic density
not a reliable solution. Moreover the proposed system works monitoring module (TDMM) and traffic management module

372 International Conference on Communication, Computing and Internet of Things (IC3IoT)

 Fig. 2. Block diagram of traffic density monitoring module (TDMM)

(TMM). The role of TDMM is to measure the length of

traffic queue created in front of signal cross-over point in
order to determine the density of traffic congestion (i.e., low,
medium, high etc.). On the other hand, TMM attempts to
dynamically adjust the operation time of traffic signals based
on the estimated density of traffic congestion on different
roads connecting to the crossings section in order to curb
the congestion properly. The detailed design and functional
architecture of these two modules are presented below.

A. Traffic density monitoring module (TDMM)

This module uses an ultrasonic sensor to measure the
length of vehicle queue. TDMM contains a microcontroller
for processing the data collected from the sensor node and
also a Wi-Fi module for sending data to TMM either directly
if it is within the communication range of TMM or via some
other TDMMs. Fig. 1 also shows that a set of TDMMs are
deployed at certain predetermined distances (such as 50 meter,
100 meter, 150 meter and so on) away of the signal crossing
on only one side of the incoming roads (if it is one-way) or
on the side of incoming direction (if it is two-way road). The
number of TDMMs to be placed is determined according to the
general statistics of the traffic volume at each road crossing.
The ultrasonic sensor node (USN) periodically emits the Fig. 3. Work flow diagram of detecting the presence of vehicle queue and
sound waves in the range of 25 − 50 KHz. It is used to communicating it to TMM.
detect the presence or absence of nearby standing vehicle by
measuring the distance from the difference of transmit time
and reception time of its emitted signal. Thus, the presence of
of its emitted signal in case the vehicle queue has reached
vehicle queue is detected by TDMM if the following condition
or exceeded its position. Each TDMM is assigned a unique
is satisfied.
id whose structure is < local TDMM id >@< road id >.
Measured distance (dm ) < reference distance (dr ), The local TDMM id is a numeric value taken from the set
of numbers {1, 2, · · · , P } in such a way that the TDMM at
where reference distance is equals to the width of road and shorter distance would be assigned lower value and P is the
measured distance is estimated as follows. number of TDMMs deployed on a certain road. On the other
dm = C × (tr − ts ) , hand, road id is the name of road in string format. If the
presence of vehicle queue is detected by some TDMM, it
where C is the speed of sound waves and, tr and ts indicates would construct a packet containing its unique id and the
the reception time and transmit time of the emitted signal of current timestamp and then broadcasts that packet through the
USN respectively. TDMMs are placed at certain height above Wi-Fi module. Apart from broadcasting its own packets, each
the ground so that the USN can receive the direct reflection TDMM would broadcast the packets received from the other

International Conference on Communication, Computing and Internet of Things (IC3IoT) 373

 TABLE I
C ORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TRAFFIC CONGESTION DENSITY AND
GREEN SIGNAL PERIOD

Traffic Congestion Density Green Signal Period

Low 20 Seconds
Medium 30 Seconds
High 50 Seconds
Very high 80 Seconds

i) Examine the unique id of source TDMM. Clas-

sify all received packets according to the road
id.
ii) Traffic congestion density on each road having
Fig. 4. Block diagram of traffic management module (TMM) exactly three TDMMs, is estimated based on
following analysis.
• No TDMM indicates presence of vehicle
TDMMs if following two conditions are satisfied.
queue, i.e., traffic queue is shorter than the
1) TP > TC − tth , where TP , TC and tth indicates the
position of first TDMM. Traffic congestion
timestamp value contained within the packet, the value
density is set to low.
of current timestamp and the value of threshold time
• Only first TDMM indicates presence of ve-
respectively. The value of threshold time (tth ) is set in
hicle queue, i.e., length of traffic queue is
such a way that the density of traffic congestion should
between the position of first TDMM and
be measured by considering the recent packets only.
second TDMM. Traffic congestion density is
2) The TDMM is located on at longer distances on same
set to medium.
road which is verified by the following two constraints.
• First and second TDMMs only indicate pres-
a) road id of remote TDMM ≡ road id of local ence of vehicle queue, i.e., length of traffic
TDMM queue is between the position of second
b) local TDMM id of remote TDMM > TDMM id of TDMM and third TDMM. Traffic congestion
local TDMM. density is set to high.
The work flow diagram of detecting the presence of vehicle • All the TDMMs indicate presence of vehicle
queue and communicating it to TMM is depicted in Fig. 3 queue, i.e., traffic queue exceeds the position
of last TDMM. Traffic congestion density is
B. Traffic Management Module (TMM)
set to very high.
This software module is deployed on a Wi-Fi enabled laptop
2) TMM determines the operation time of the traffic signals
or work station which is positioned at the road crossing as
based on the values of the estimated density of traffic
shown in fig. 1. TMM is connected through its serial port to a
congestion and loads these values into the microcon-
microcontroller, which is attached to the signal LED via some
troller.
relay module as depicted by fig. 4. The relay module is an
electromagnetic switch which is operated by some safe low- IV. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
voltage circuit in order to control a high-voltage circuit. TMM Traffic congestion is one of the major issues with the
is responsible for estimating the density of traffic congestion public transportation system of all developing countries in
which is labeled as low, medium, high and so on, on the recent time, as it not only increases the fuel consumption
various roads and then dynamically sets the operation time but also the air pollution as well as the risk of heart attack.
of the traffic signals based on the values of estimated density This paper presents an IoT-based intelligent traffic congestion
of the traffic congestion on different roads. A suitable mapping control system in order to reduce the congestion delay via
between various values of the estimated density of traffic dynamic management of traffic signals at the road crossings.
congestion and their corresponding green signal periods is The proposed congestion control system dynamically sets
illustrated in table I. TMM adopts the following algorithm signal operation time based on the estimated values of traffic
to perform the above mentioned tasks. congestion density and it also employs a novel technique of
Algorithm 1: Estimation of traffic congestion density and its estimating the density of traffic congestion by using USN.
management: However, only the design part of the proposed system is
1) Extract the timestamp value of each packet (TP ) and presented in this paper. No experimental results have been
compare it with current timestamp (TC ). provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
a) Ignore packet if TP ≤ TC − tth , where tth is system. The evaluation of performances of this proposed
predefined threshold time. congestion control system through some test bed is our future
b) Otherwise execute the following steps. goal of research.

374 International Conference on Communication, Computing and Internet of Things (IC3IoT)

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors gratefully acknowledge the facilities and sup-
port provided by the Director and all other staff members
of the School of Mobile Computing and Communication,
Jadavpur University, a Centre of Excellence set up under
the  University with potential for Excellence Scheme of the
UGC.
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