Highway congestion due to traffic incidents costs billions of dollars in lost productivity and billions of gallons in wasted fuel. With advance notification of traffic congestion, drivers could make educated decisions about taking alternate routes, thus saving time and fuel. Recently, systems using vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) that employ vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications have been proposed for this purpose. Unfortunately, relying solely on V2V communications has the undesired side effect of inviting the introduction of false alerts and misleading messages.
This project takes a novel look at solving the problem of propagating traffic-related information in VANETs in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The goal of this project is to develop and evaluate an architecture for the Notification of Traffic Incidents and Congestion (NOTICE). NOTICE consists of sensor belts embedded in the roadway at regular intervals. Vehicles passing over a belt will provide information about their travel directly to the belt. The collective information stored by the belts will be used to make intelligent inferences about the occurrence of traffic incidents. NOTICE will provide secure and privacy-preserving communications between vehicles and the belts, efficiently propagate incident information to vehicles, and infer the presence of traffic congestion without driver intervention.
The results of this research will be disseminated through journal and conference publications. The broader impacts of this project include providing a basis for a deployable incident notification system and the development of new courses in vehicular networks, sensor networks, security, and embedded and distributed systems.
