REAL TIME TRAFFIC MONITORING SYSTEM AND
DRIVER ASSISTANCE
1
CHAITHRA M H, 2KANTHARAJU V, 3ANIL KUMAR B N
1.2
3
Assistant Professor, KNSIT, Bangalore
Assistant Professor, BRCE, Bangalore
Abstract- This paper deals with building a smarter vehicle which can assist the driver by giving real-time traffic conditions
on a map and also provide additional features, such as lane-change detectors, blind spot monitoring, alcohol level
measurement and collision avoidance/warning. All of the stated features will be embedded on a single device. A Raspberry
Pi board along with IMU, sensors, LCD screen, GPS and ZigBee will be used to accomplish the above stated task. For any
vehicle that will be using this device, a dynamic, p2p network will be set up with the help of Zigbee modules, which will
help give the traffic conditions for any instance of time. By using a GPS module, the network topology can be interlace with
pre-downloaded maps.For driver assistance various sensors such as Alcohol sensors, an IMU-Inertial Measurement Unit i.e.
Triple axis Accelerometer, Gyro and Magnetometer, etc. will be used to provide assistance. This paper explains how real
time traffic information can be derived through a network without the help of large scale infrastructure and at the same time
also provide various driver assistance.
Keywords- Raspberry Pi, IMU-Inertial Measurement Unit, LCD screen, Global Positioning system, Zigbee, Peer to peer
(p2p), Ad-hoc and mesh network.
I. INTRODUCTION
II. RASPBERRY PI
Traffic Jams are a common sight in almost all major
cities around the world, in fact all cities face traffic
congestions or jams on a regular basis. In India, this
problem is compounded with poor and inefficient
infrastructure planning, thus leading to jams that
normally last for hours. The 2nd most populous
country in the world also has the one of the highest
number of vehicles being sold, be it two, three or four
wheelers, which only makes the non-lane based
traffic in India see a rise in the traffic problems. This
situation exponentially grows during peak hours,
where too much time and fuel are wasted. The
existing traffic monitoring systems fail to provide any
real time traffic information to a driver and these
systems have a critical issue as to the correct and
accurate estimate of the traffic on the roads. If the
traffic network state cannot be estimated with
reasonable accuracy, any predictions produced on
that basis can be problematic. This can result in
erroneous traffic advisory or control strategies that
may cause the network to perform worse than the one
without a real time system in place.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board
computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi
Foundation. The Raspberry Pi is manufactured in two
board configurations.
Figure 1 : Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi processor is a 700MHz
Broadcomm system on a chip with a Videocore 4
GPU. That provides OpenGL ES 2.0, hardwareaccelerated OpenVG and 1080p HD video. There's
256MB of on-board RAM and sockets for HDMI,
USB 2.0, RCA video, USB 2.0 and 3.5mm audio
jacks, and power comes via a MicroUSB
connector.The model B adds a second USB 2.0 port
and a 10/100 BaseT Ethernet connection. There's no
Wi-Fi in either version. It doesn't come with a case,
either, and there's no hard disk or SSD - it's designed
to use SD cards for booting and storage.
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)
Scope: The section I, deals with the introduction of
the concept traffic monitoring and traffic jams.
Section II describes existing model Raspberry Pi
Model B and how it is measured in IMU. Section III
describes about the global positioning system in
traffic monitoring and the working of GPS. Section
IV briefs about the zigbee module. Section V briefs
about the P2P, Ad-hoc and Mesh Network. Section
VI briefs about the proposed system in the real time
traffic monitoring state transitions and functions.
Section VII briefs the conclusion and future
enhancements.
Proceedings of 2nd IRF International Conference, 21st September-2014, Vizag, India, ISBN: 978-93-84209-53-7
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Real Time Traffic Monitoring System And Driver Assistance
An inertial measurement unit, or IMU, is an
electronic device that measures and reports on a
craft's velocity, orientation, and gravitational forces,
using a combination of accelerometers and
gyroscopes, sometimes also magnetometers.

the time the message was transmitted and,
Satellite position at time of message transmission
Figure 3: Working of GPS
The receiver uses the messages it receives to
determine the transit time of each message and
computes the distance to each satellite using the
speed of light. Each of these distances and satellites'
locations defines a sphere. The receiver is on the
surface of each of these spheres when the distances
and the satellites' locations are correct. These
distances and satellites' locations are used to compute
the location of the receiver using the navigation
equations. This location is then displayed. Basic GPS
measurements yield only a position, and neither speed
nor direction. However, most GPS units can
automatically derive velocity and direction of
movement from two or more position measurements.
Figure 2: Inertial Measurement Unit
An inertial measurement unit works by detecting the
current rate of acceleration using one or
more accelerometers, and detects changes in
rotational using one or more gyroscopes. And some
also include a magnetometer, mostly to assist
calibrate against orientation drift.
Inertial navigation systems contain IMUs which have
angular and linear accelerometers (for changes in
position); some IMUs include a gyroscopic element
(for maintaining an absolute angular reference).
Angular accelerometers measure how the vehicle is
rotating in space. Linear accelerometers measure nongravitational accelerations of the vehicle. Since it can
move in three axes (up & down, left & right, forward
& back), there is a linear accelerometer for each axis.
A computer continually calculates the vehicle's
current position. First, for each of the six degrees of
freedom (x, y, z and θx, θy and θz), it integrates over
time the sensed acceleration, together with an
estimate of gravity, to calculate the current velocity.
Then it integrates the velocity to calculate the current
position.
IV. ZIGBEE
ZigBee is a specification for a suite of high level
communication protocols used to create personal area
networks built from small, low-power digital radios.
ZigBee is based on an IEEE 802.15 standard. Though
low-powered, ZigBee devices can transmit data over
long distances by passing data through intermediate
devices to reach more distant ones, creating a mesh
network; i.e., a network with no centralized control or
high-power transmitter/receiver able to reach all of
the networked devices. The decentralized nature of
such networks make them suitable for applications
where a central node can't be relied upon.
III. GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a spacebased satellite navigation system that provides
location and time information in all weather
conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth where
there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more
GPS satellites.
A GPS receiver calculates its position by precisely
timing the signals sent by GPS satellites high above
the Earth. Each satellite continually transmits
messages that include:
Figure 4: Zigbee Module
ZigBee is used in applications that require only a low
data rate, long battery life, and secure networking.
Proceedings of 2nd IRF International Conference, 21st September-2014, Vizag, India, ISBN: 978-93-84209-53-7
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Real Time Traffic Monitoring System And Driver Assistance
ZigBee has a defined rate of 250 kbits/s, best suited
for periodic or intermittent data The ZigBee network
layer natively supports both star and tree typical
networks, and generic mesh networks. Every network
must have one coordinator device, tasked with its
creation, the control of its parameters and basic
maintenance. Within star networks, the coordinator
must be the central node. Both trees and meshes
allow the use of ZigBee routers to extend
communication at the network level.
module, the network topology can be interlaced with
pre-downloaded maps. Hence the driver can get an
even clear view of the various traffic flow on the
roads around him/her as he/she drives around.
V. P2P, AD-HOC AND MESH NETWORK
A peer-to-peer
(P2P)
network is
a
type
of decentralized and distributed network architecture
in
which
individual nodes in
the
network
(called "peers") act as both suppliers and consumers
of resources. In a peer-to-peer network, tasks (such as
searching for files or streaming audio/video) are
shared amongst multiple interconnected peers who
each make a portion of their resources (such as
processing
power, disk
storage or network
bandwidth) directly available to other network
participants, without the need for centralized
coordination by servers.
Figure 5: Block diagram of proposed system
For driver assistance, an alcohol sensor will be
embedded at the steering wheel and another one near
the window pillar, alcohol limits when the driver
breathes. Similarly for lane change, sensors will be
place in the front bumper, which will warn the driver
in-case of lane change.
A mesh network is a network topology in which
each node relays data for the network. All nodes
cooperate in the distribution of data in the network.
The IMU-Inertial Measurement Unit i.e. Triple axis
Accelerometer, Gyro and Magnetometer, will give
the vehicle’s velocity, which will measure alcohol
limits when the driver breathes. Similarly for lane
change, sensors will be place in the front bumper,
which will warn the driver in-case of lane change.
A mesh network can be designed using
a flooding technique or a routing technique. When
using a routing technique, the message is propagated
along a path, by hopping from node to node until the
destination is reached. To ensure all its paths'
availability, a routing network must allow for
continuous connections and reconfiguration around
broken
or
blocked
paths,
using selfhealing algorithms. A mesh network whose nodes are
all connected to each other is a fully connected
network. Mesh networks can be seen as one type of
ad hoc network. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET)
and mesh networks are therefore closely related, but
MANET also have to deal with the problems
introduced by the mobility of the nodes. The selfhealing capability enables a routing based network to
operate when one node breaks down or a connection
goes bad. As a result, the network is typically quite
reliable, as there is often more than one path between
a source and a destination in the network. Although
mostly used in wireless situations, this concept is also
applicable to wired networks and software
interaction.
The IMU-Inertial Measurement Unit i.e. Triple axis
Accelerometer, Gyro and Magnetometer, will give
the vehicle’s velocity, orientation.
These sensors working in tandem to compensate the
pitfalls of each other for giving a clean orientation
using algorithm filtering. It enables the IMU to
become a very powerful control mechanism for
vehicles. We will process the data from the sensors,
and calculate the direction of the vehicle along with is
current speed.
Through the p2p network, information will be
transmitted to all other similar devices in the network.
Using this data, other systems will calculate the
distance between vehicles, the direction and the speed
at which vehicles will be travelling.
VI. PROPOSED SYSTEM
This will help in achieving blind spot monitoring and
collision avoidance/warning. The refresh rate of the
data must be very high, as it will be used to detect
any collision or danger of collision due to change of
lane or overtaking, etc. caused by some other vehicle.
For any vehicle that will be using this device, a
dynamic, p2p network will be set up with the help of
Zigbee modules, which will help give the traffic
conditions for any instance of time. By using a GPS
Proceedings of 2nd IRF International Conference, 21st September-2014, Vizag, India, ISBN: 978-93-84209-53-7
37
Real Time Traffic Monitoring System And Driver Assistance
Figure 6: Real Time Traffic Monitoring
– State Transitions and Functions
The real time network topology will be display on a
LCD screen, this will give the driver information
about all other vehicles within the range of the Zigbee
module. Thus, drivers can optimize their route based
on the traffic conditions as they see on the screen,
thus saving time and fuel. As an additional
enhancement to the Real Time Traffic Monitoring
(RTMS) we can use Enhancing driving efficiency and
distributing traffic and easing congestions and traffic
jams.
the data to monitor and regulate traffic and at the
same time study the vehicular traffic pattern across
the city, using the same technology they will also be
able to track stolen vehicles and also their own,
similarly major companies can track their cabs used
to pick and drop their employees, enhancing their
security, etc. In case of accidents where traffic often
end up in opposite lanes, fall off from great heights or
turn over, using the information gathered from the
device on board a message can be sent to various
emergency services to take action as fast as possible.
Similarly data can be gathered to investigate
accidents by insurance companies and other
departments. Lastly a collision avoidance system can
be built using the device that will over come the
delays present in ultrasound bases sensors and GPS
bases collision avoidance system.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE
ENHANCEMENT
This paper presents a real-time traffic monitoring
system using wireless technology over Zigbee and at
the same time also various driver assistance. This
system will reduce existing physical and inadequate
infrastructure by virtually removing most of it. By
comparison it will be cheaper to existing technology
as most of it uses open source technology and is
available to anybody. It is quite easy to implement it
and will be user friendly. The future enhancement
will add versatility to the system by enabling it to
send real time data to various public departments
such as the police and hospitals and other emergency
services if and when corresponding situation arise.
The data collected from the vehicles can be uploaded
online and made available to the traffic police,
companies and hospitals. The traffic police can use
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