Sensory Data Gathering for Road Traffic Monitoring: Energy Efficiency, Reliability, and Fault Tolerance

Vehicular traffic monitoring and control using through road sensor network is challenging due to a continuous data streaming over the resource constrained sensor devices. The delay sensitivity and reliability of the large volume of application data as well as the scarcity of sensor resources demand efficient designing of data collection protocol. In this Chapter, a novel tree-based data gathering scheme has been proposed, exploiting the strip-like structure of the road network. An efficient scheduling mechanism is implemented to assure both the coverage and the critical power savings of the sensor nodes. The network connectivity is guaranteed throughout by the proposed tree maintenance module that handles the dynamics of the network as a result of sensor node joining and leaving events. An application message controller has been designed that works cooperatively with the tree management module, and handles continuous streaming of the application data to ensure no loss or redundancy in data delivery. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using the simulation results and compared with other approaches for large data collection in sensor network.