International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882

Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2015

Implementation of VANET in Transportation using Wireless Sensors

Amrish Kumar
Computer Science & Engineering
Subharti Institute of Engineering &
Technology, Meerut, India

Mr. Shri Niwashn Sir

Computer Science & Engineering
Subharti Institute of Engineering & Technology
Meerut, India.

Abstract
Every Year, Millions of people around the world
die in car accidents and many more are stricken.
Executions of safety information such as speed limits and
road conditions are used in many parts of the world but
still more work is remained. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
should, upon implementation, collect and distribute safety
information to massively reduce the number of accidents
by warning drivers about the danger before they actually
face it. Such networks comprise of sensors and On Board
Units installed in the car as well as Road Side Units. The
data collected from the sensors on the vehicles can be
displayed to the driver, sent to the RSU or even
broadcasted to other vehicles depending on its nature and
importance. One important objective of the vehicular ad
hoc network is to improve safety in driving. However, the
VANET does not give guarantee for timely detection of
dangerous road conditions or maintain communication
connectivity when the probability of low density of road
side units (e.g., in rural highways), probability of low
density of vehicles (e.g., at mid night in rural areas) and
high mobility of vehicles, which may create a big problem
to safety in driving. To overcome this serious problem, we
propose to hybrid the VANET with the inexpensive
wireless sensor network. Therefore, sensor nodes are
deployed along the roadside to sense road conditions, and
to store and forward information about dangerous
conditions to vehicles regardless of the density or
connectivity of the VANET. But wireless sensor networks
are subject to energy and processing constraints. For
battery-powered sensor nodes, IEEE 802.15.4 is a wellestablished radio technology that permits embedded
systems to function up to years on a simple pair of AA
batteries. But for providing battery powered in rural areas
where lack of power supply is a big problem to do so, we
can use RSB (Rechargeable Solar Batteries) as an
additional power resource. Along with the concept of
VANET-WSN Hybrid, new challenges occurs and should
be overcome. In this thesis, we find out these challenges
and propose schemes to overcome these challenges and
also create an efficient vehicle-sensor and sensor-sensor
communication protocol among Hybrid VANET-WSN
System.

Keywords- MANET, AODV, R-AODV,

ROUTE OPTIMIZATION

MOBILITY,

1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Ad hoc Network:
With the advance of wireless communication
technology, portable computers with radios are being
increasingly deployed in common activities. Applications
such as conferences, meetings, lectures, crowd control,
search and rescue, disaster recovery, and automated
battlefields typically do not have central administration or
infrastructure available. Ad hoc networks consisting of
hosts equipped with portable radios must be deployed
impromptu without any wired base stations. In ad hoc
networks, each host must act as a router since routes are
mostly multi-hop. Nodes in such a network move
arbitrarily, thus network topology changes frequently,
unpredictably. Moreover, wireless channel bandwidth is
limited. The scarce bandwidth decreases even further due
to the effects of multiple access, signal interference, and
channel fading. Network hosts of ad hoc networks operate
on constrained battery power which will eventually be
exhausted. Ad hoc networks are also more prone to
security threats. In addition to the classic routing, ad hoc
networks can use flooding for forwarding the data. The
decentralized nature of wireless ad hoc networks makes
them suitable for a variety of applications where central
nodes can't be relied on, and may improve the scalability
of wireless ad hoc networks compared to wireless
managed networks, though theoretical and practical limits
to the overall capacity of such networks have been
identified. Minimal configuration and quick deployment
make ad hoc networks suitable for emergency situations
like natural disasters or military conflicts. The presence of
dynamic and adaptive routing protocols enables ad hoc
networks to be formed quickly.
1.2 MANET (Mobile ad-hoc Network)
A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self
configuring infra structure less network of mobile devices
connected by wireless links. Each device in a MANET is
free to move independently in any direction, and will
therefore change its links to other devices frequently. Each
must forward traffic unrelated to its own use, and therefore
be a router. MANETs are a kind of wireless ad hoc

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2015

networks that usually has a routable networking

environment on top of a Link Layer ad hoc network. The
growth of laptops and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking
have made MANETs a popular research topic since the
mid 1990s.
1.3 VANET
Driving means changing constantly location. This
means a constant demand for information on the current
location and specifically for data on the surrounding
traffic, routes and much more. This information can be
grouped together in several categories. A very important
category is driver assistance and car safety. This includes
many different things mostly based on sensor data from
other cars. One could think of brake warning sent from
preceding car, tailgate and collision warning, information
about road condition and maintenance, detailed regional
weather forecast, premonition of traffic jams, caution to an
accident behind the next bend, detailed information about
an accident for the rescue team and many other things.
One could also think of local updates of the cars
navigation systems or an assistant that helps to follow a
friends car. Another category is infotainment for
passengers. For example internet information as next free
parking space (perhaps with a reservation system), detailed
information about fuel prices and services offered by the
next service station or just tourist information about sights.
A possible other category is car maintenance. For example
online help from your car mechanic when your car breaks
down or just simply service information. So far no intervehicle communication system for data exchange between
vehicles and between roadside and vehicles has been put
into operation.

1.4 Related Work

The interest in vehicular networks research has been
increasing exponentially over the last few years. Farnoud
et al. in [12] used a positive orthogonal code to distribute a
transmission pattern for broadcast messages. In this paper,
the performance in terms of the success probability and the
average delay in message delivery was reported. In [10], a
model for deriving the packet delivery delay between
disconnected vehicles, the re-healing time, was proposed.
It was shown that this time can increase to values in excess
of 100 seconds in multihop disconnected communications,
which is unacceptable for vehicular networks. A pure
vehicle-to-vehicle network may not be sufficient to ensure
good performance and efficiency when the network is
sparse. Therefore, many researchers proposed the vehicleto-infrastructure (V2I) communication where roadside
1.5 Overview of VANET-WSN System
Since the inexpensive ZigBee can provide low-power,
short-range wireless communication, we propose to
integrate the VANET with the WSN to provide timely
detection of road conditions and to help connect
partitioned segments of the VANET. Wireless sensor
nodes, for example, MicaZ motes [15], are much cheaper
than roadside stations of current VANETs. Besides, some
inexpensive, low-power and small-size sensing modules,
for example, the WiEye passive infrared sensors [25], have
been commercialized and can be installed on the motes to
sense road conditions with low cost.
These sensor nodes can be deployed along roadside with
higher density than current roadside stations to form a
connected network together with the VANET. The sensor
nodes can sense the road conditions, collect and process
the sensing data to find out information useful for safe
driving, and deliver the information to vehicles that need
it. The sensor nodes also can buffer the safety-related
information generated by vehicles, and forward the
information to vehicles in different partitions of the
VANET.

Figure 1.1: VANET

Routing issues have been big issues but right now, wellstudied for wireless networking during the last two decade.
Figure 1.2 Hybrid VANET-WSN application example
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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2015

Figure 1.2 explains a VANET-WSN Hybrid System based

application example in which a WSN is employed to
detect wildlife on the road and interacts with VANET (or
other related technology) equipped vehicles to enhance the
drivers and passengers safety and at the same time to
avoid, for instance, endangered species fatalities.

discovery. Route search happens when a source node (say

S) has packets to send to a destination node (say D) but S
doesnt have a route to D in its routing table. To establish a
route to D, S broadcasts a route request (RREQ) message
searching for D. The RREQ message is propagated
throughout the entire network or a limited scope (by
controlling the TTL =1 of the RREQ). When the RREQ
reaches the destination D, D sends a route reply (RREP)
message to S. Other intermediate nodes

3. OBJECTIVES AND CHALLENGES

Figure 1.3: Example I for Hybrid VANET-WSN System

Example II. Fig. 1.4 shows that, bad road conditions (e.g.,
slippery surface) detected by an isolated vehicle can be
told to nearby roadside WSN nodes, and the WSN nodes
can then collaborate with each other to propagate the
information to other vehicles approaching this dangerous
area. Note that, this cannot be accomplished if only
VANET can be used since the VANET is not connected.

Figure 1.4: Example II for

To realize the proposed VANET-WSN system, several

important issues should be investigated. Firstly, the system
should be really viable in the real scenarios. The impact of
interference, noises and other environmental factors on the
performance of the system should be investigated.
Secondly, the system should be highly scalable,
considering the large scale of highway system in the
world. As the scale of deployment increases, the difficulty
in deploying and maintaining the system should not
increase much, and the quality of service and the energy
efficiency of the system should remain stable. Thirdly, the
system should be flexible to changes in the real world.
WSN nodes may fail or lose time synchronization, the
highways may be extended or reshaped, and traffic pattern
may change from time to time. It is desired that the
deployment and the working parameters of VANET-WSN
system can be adjusted with low overhead as the above
changes happen. Fourthly, energy efficiency should be
maximized for the roadside WSN.
Although WSN nodes can be deployed and redeployed by
humans and their batteries can be replaced manually when
necessary, it is still important to minimize the energy
consumption and maximize the network life time to reduce
energy and maintenance costs. Finally, satisfactory quality
of service should be attained. Dangerous road conditions
should be detected and the information about the dangers
should be delivered to related vehicles, both in a timely
fashion, to ensure driving safety.

2. HYBRID VANET-WSN SYSTEM

by the two detrimental facts with link insecurity in the
single path model. It is very common that ad hoc networks,
in which mobile devices communicate each other via
temporary links, are built using WLAN products. In the
IEEE 802.11b standard, the Wired Equivalent Privacy
scheme is used as the only measure to enhance data
confidentiality against eavesdropping. However, owing to
the well known pitfalls in Initialization Vector attachment
in the ciphertext, The underlying 40-bit RC4 encryption
mechanism in WEP is unsafe regardless of the key size.
Rendong Bai and Mukesh Singhal [10] salving route reply
in AODV, An on-demand routing protocol typically
consists of two Components: route maintenance and route

4. PROPOSED SCHEME
Proposed System Overview of Hybrid VANET-WSN
System
While VANETs and WSNs have common features, such
as network self-organization, they also have important
odds. VANET nodes are typically fitted with relatively
powerful computing devices called OBUs (On Board
Units). Next, since we know that VANETs node are
connected to the power supply of vehicles or are located at
the roadside units, they usually do not have pressure on
energy consumption. In contrast, sensor nodes have
extremely small physical dimensions and strong constraint
in the processing and energy capabilities. For battery-

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2015

powered sensor nodes, IEEE 802.15.4 [1] is a wellestablished radio technology that permits embedded
systems to function up to years on a simple pair of AA
batteries. But for providing battery powered in rural areas
where lack of power supply is a big obstacle to do so, we
can use RSB (Rechargeable Solar Batteries) as an
additional power source.
The hybrid, road-side WSN VANET communication
architecture assumes that vehicles are fitted with an on
board-unit (OBU) and two wireless network interfaces;
namely IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.15.4. The sensor data
are stored in a distributed and redundant database in the
sensor nodes. Data are also transmitted to coming vehicles,
which can propagate hazard warnings into the VANET.
In the proposed architecture, the sensor nodes in the WSN
with RSB, store the collected information to communicate
the data to crossing vehicles via IEEE 802.14. For
communication among the sensor nodes, the WSN is
randomly partitioned into groups i.e clusters, where each
cluster is managed by a cluster head (e.g. WSN Gateway).
The sensor nodes (SNs) transmit data to their cluster
heads, which transmit the aggregated data to other cluster
heads. Data from the WSN are forwarded into the VANET
by vehicles in the communication range of a sensor. Once
the vehicle has received the sensor data, it can broadcast
the information to relevant in a geographical region by the
Geocast protocol. Clearly, the OBU of a vehicle plays a
vital role in the architecture since it acts as a gateway
between the WSN and the VANET and decides about
injection and forwarding of relevant sensor data.

Fig. 2.1. Proposed Hybrid VANET-WSN System

architecture
2.1 Network Deployment
The proposed system consists of highly mobile vehicle
nodes and static roadside sensor nodes. Each vehicle node
has two communication interfaces: a WiFi (IEEE 802.11)
interface for communication with other vehicle nodes; and
a ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) interface for communication
with roadside sensor nodes. In our prototype, each vehicle
node is an on-car laptop with an embedded WiFi card and
an attached Telosb mote [15].
Each sensor node has a ZigBee interface used to
communicate with other sensor nodes and with vehicle
nodes, and in our prototype, each sensor node is a Telosb

mote. Sensor nodes are also mounted with sensors which

are used to sense road conditions.

Figure 2.2: Network Deployment

As illustrated in Fig. 2.2, sensor nodes are deployed along
one side of the highway. We consider only one-way
highways, though the system can be extended to two-way
roads. The sensor nodes form a connected network.
According to their roles, sensor nodes have two different
classifications: the regular sensor node and the access
point sensor node (called AP thereafter), which can sense
and relay messages, while APs have extra responsibilities
of discovering and communicating with vehicles, and
managing the network. APs are much fewer than regular
nodes. Regular nodes that are deployed between two
adjacent APs along the roadside form a group. As shown
in Fig. 2.2, one highway may merge into another one, two
highways may be connected with a ramp, and one highway
may branch into two or more highways; hence, the
roadside sensor network is not linear. In our design, the
node connected with three or more linear segments must
be an AP.
In practice, some roads (e.g., in mountain areas) may be
more prone to safety-related events than others; hence,
sensor nodes may only be deployed along the roads with
high risks. This way, deployed sensor nodes do not form a
single connected network, but multiple disconnected
networks. Our design is flexible and is applicable to such
deployment due to the modularity approach adopted.
1/8, 1/16, 1/32. In general we will denote the Shrinking
mechanism with p = 1/ as Shrink-.
In short, the single hop Shrink mechanism achieves its
goal of optimizing connection topology by replacing a 2hop connection to 1-hop connection thereby eliminating
unnecessary relay node. The protocol that achieves this
will now be described, of this new hypothesized link may
not be good enough to warrant changing the routing table.
Therefore, before doing any update to the routing table, the
quality of the prospective new link is checked by looking
at the signal strength at which the Shrink packet.
Therefore, before doing any update in the routing table, the
quality of the prospective new link is checked by looking

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering & Technology (IJSRET), ISSN 2278 0882
Volume 4, Issue 6, June 2015

at the received signal strength at the receiver side was

received , replaced with the address of the originator of the
Shrink-1 packet. Such a situation does not alter the
operation of proposed mechanism, since each node
responds to different Shrinking messages arising from
different transient connections independently i.e. since the
shrinking of each connection occurs independently of all
others.
5.1 Summary of Thesis
In this thesis, we first studied the big challenges for both
sparsely deployed and densely deployed wireless ad hoc
network. We then introduced the emerging wireless
communication technology, namely ZigBee, which
supports low-power, low-cost, short-range communication.
Maintaining stable connectivity is a big challenge for
sparsely deployed and highly dynamic ad hoc wireless
network. Reducing contention and maximizing network
throughput is also a big challenge for densely deployed ad
hoc wireless network, especially when many devices
locate in a small area and each device has heavy duty
message to transmit. Inspired by the fact that more and
more devices support multiple different wireless
communication interfaces, we propose two systems to
address above challenges by assisting existing wireless ad
hoc network by ZigBee interfaces.

5. CONCLUSION & FUTURE WORK

An Hybrid VANET-WSN system was proposed to address
the connectivity issue in sparsely deployed VANET.
Protocols were designed for efficient vehicle-sensor and
sensor-sensor interactions. In order to reduce contention of
pure WiFi network, we have proposed a simple yet
effective system for ZigBee-assisted WiFi transmission to
improve system throughput. Mobile devices form clusters
based on the information gathered by their ZigBee
interfaces. Coordinated through ZigBee interfaces,
members in each cluster take turns to transmit using their
WiFi interface, resulting in reduced contention and
collision. Results of experiment and simulation have
verified our design by showing that, the throughput, power
consumption and fairness can be improved.

6. FUTURE WORK
There are several future research works we can do about
our proposed VANET-WSN system.
The main future works of VANET-WSN system are
summarized as follows.
1. Even though the node failure within one group has no
effect on other groups because of the modularity of our
design, it is important for VANET-WSN to detect node
failure and replace the failed node with good one timely.
Otherwise, it is possible that the dangerous road condition

happens within the range covered by the group which

contains the failed node will not be seen by incoming
drivers.
2. Detecting nodes with low battery and replace the
batteries timely is another important and challenge work.
Sensors may not work well when their battery is low. The
communication range may become short and the sensing
accuracy may become low.
3. Since the conditions of highways may be very
complicated. From drivers's prospective, false warning
message is no better than no warning message. Thus
detecting the real road condition accurately is very
important for drivers. In our proposed system, we believe
in the sensors. Whatever warning message sent out by the
detecting sensors, we believe the message is true.
However, it is possible that the sensor may send out some
false warning message. It is another challenge to make
sure that only the true warning message will be propagated
through our proposed network.
4. In this thesis, we only consider one-way road. Even
though it is easy to extend our proposed system to twoway roads, new challenges may appear when we deploy
the system on two way roads, such as ZigBee interference
from both road sides.

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