International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)

ISSN (Online): 2319-7064

Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2015): 6.391

An Intelligent Traffic and Vehicle Monitoring

System using Internet of Things Architecture
Bharath Kumar Perumalla1, M. Sunil Babu2
1
PG Student,
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology,
Namburu, Guntur (dt.), A. P. (India)
bharathp5192@gmail.com
2
Associate Professor
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology,
Namburu, Guntur (dt.), A. P. (India)
sunil.babu.m@gmail.com

Abstract: Traffic in modern cities and urban area is creating huge menace and is a major concern for the public and
administration system. Incidents such as jams, accidents have become quite common because of exponential growth in vehicles on
road. While human errors are one of the major reasons for these problems, the lack of proper measures and adaptive traffic control
system is another reason. Security for the vehicles is also important. Even in this latest technological world, hackers are still
managing to break the security aspects incorporated in modern vehicles. Many technologies such as RFID, Bluetooth, Zigbee, GSM-
GPS based systems were developed but they have limitations in terms of operation and usage. Internet of Things (IoT), a technology
that connects various objects, is growing at a rapid pace. This paper presents traffic and vehicle monitoring system based on IoT.
This system is capable of addressing problems such as traffic congestion, early warnings regarding jams, vehicle spotting, VIP and
emergency vehicle clearance. The system is built using ATMEGA 2560 microcontroller board, and AMICA NodeMCU IoT board,
and UBLOX NEO 6N GPS module. The compact design makes the system more reliable and accurate.

Keywords: ATMEGA, GPS, IoT, Traffic Management, Ublox-Neo 6M

1. Introduction have been proposed [5]. It includes rule based learning to

the modern fuzzy and neural network approaches.
One of the major sources of revenue for many countries
is transportation. Human transportation, logistics, private Findler and Stapp described an expert system based on
traffic forms part of transportation. The developing and connected roads and traffic lighting system. These expert
developed countries are striving to improve the standard systems use a set of rules and based on those rules, the
and efficiency of transportation system. Because of the next action will be decided. As mentioned in [6], the
traffic jams, and lack of proper traffic management system, rules are analyzed by optimizing set of rules that apply to
time and money of the public is being wasted. Goods them and based on the frequency at which these rules
transportation, machinery and human transportation are the fire. Authors show that the system developed by then can
key factors which influence the development of industries. perform better
The development of traffic monitoring and controlling
system is a very important requirement in all the countries.
Figure 1 shows the blue print of Intelligent Traffic System.
As there is a rapid growth in the traffic these days, the
authorities have to find different ways to avoid these
problems [1-4]. Measures such as developing new roads,
over bridges, under bridges, fly-overs, tunnel roads etc. are
some alternatives. Apart from this, use of trains such as
Light Rapid Transit [LRT] trains is handy. Construction of
inner ring roads will divert the traffic and provides easy
monitoring of traffic during peak hours.

2. Literature Survey Figure 1: Intelligent Transportation System

In this section we discuss about different methods provided they make slight modifications and simplified
of monitoring and control. Related to the traffic monitoring assumptions. In [7], a traffic light system using a simple
and vehicle monitoring, many approaches and methods predictor was developed by Tavladakis and Voulgaris. It
takes measurements during current cycle and uses these

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 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2015): 6.391
measurements to test several possible settings for the next
cycle. This system proves to be highly adaptive but could
not handle high traffic fluctuations.

In [8], Liu has demonstrated some methods to

overcome the fluctuations by incorporating traffic detectors
at both sides of a junction and vehicle identification were
used to measure the average delay at a junction. Tan
describe a fuzzy logic controller for a single junction that
should mimic human intelligence [9]. Traffic is quantized
as many, medium and none. This system uses a
predetermined order of states and the states can be skipped
if there is no traffic volume in that particular state.

In [10], Lee et al. used fuzzy logic to control Figure 2: (a) Tracking Module (b) Monitoring Module
traffic at multiple junctions. In [11], Choi et al. used fuzzy
logic controllers and is used to adapt them to the congested 3.1 Tracking Module
traffic flow. A better strategy compared to the fixed fuzzy
logic traffic light controller is shown in [12]. This system The tracking part is placed inside the car. This
will work perfectly even in larger traffic flow under very module is designed to read the latitude and longitude of the
crowded traffic conditions. In [13], fuzzy method locations through which the car is traversed. Ublox NEO-
augmented with the hierarchy and interpolation are applied 6M GPS module is used for reading latitude and longitude.
to the large number of lanes and more road intersections to This module is updated to use with latest microcontrollers
decrease the complexity. Taale et al. compare using and the position information given by this module is very
evolutionary algorithms evolution strategy to evolve a accurate. This module is configured to 115200 bps to
traffic light controller for a single simulated intersection to communicate with the microcontroller. It is a standalone
using the common traffic light controller in the Netherlands GPS receiver and takes 1 Second time to first fix for hot
(the RWS C-controller). There are many other methods and and aided starts. The tracking sensitivity of the module is -
approaches in many different programs, each have their 162 dBm and also has anti-jamming technology
own pros and cons. incorporated. The position update rate is 5Hz. Operating in
a temperature range of -40 to 85 0 C, the module has UART
TTL socket and EEPROM to store settings of the receiver.
This avoids configuring the module on each restart. The
device RoHS compliant and has rechargeable battery for
backup.

Figure 1 ITVMS running in Priority Mode

Figure 3: Ublox Neo – 6M GPS Module
In this paper, we present a novel method to control and
The National Marine Electronics Association
monitor the traffic. This system uses Internet of Things
(NMEA) is the standard body for providing specifications
architecture. The system block diagram is shown in Figure
and defining interfaces between marine equipment. Using
2.
this standard, marine equipment can communicate with the
other equipment. GPS communication uses this NMEA
The system contains two parts. The first part is used to track
standard for its communication. All the programs and
the car and the second part contains logic to monitor and
systems expect the data in this format for processing. The
control the traffic. Each of these sections is elaborated in
data contains position, velocity and time information
the following sections.
computed by the GPS receiver.
3. System Design NodeMCU is the microcontroller used for this
purpose. The NodeMCU microcontroller contains nine
As we already mentioned, the entire system is divided into digital I/O pins and one analog I/O pin with built-in ADC.
two parts. Now let us look into the details of each of these It support UART, I2C, and SPI communication protocols
parts in detail. and requires 600 mA of current for its full load operation.
The device operates at 3.3V power supply. The

Volume 5 Issue 11, November 2016

www.ijsr.net
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY
 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2015): 6.391
microcontroller is equipped with an ESP8266 Wi-Fi
module. In this mode, we can overcome the problem in the
conventional traffic systems where people wait in the traffic
The ESP8266 Wi-Fi module contains an in built even when there is no much traffic. IR Sensors are installed
Tensilicon 80 MHz 32-bit RISC processor. It has 4 MB of on all sides of the lanes. The density can be identified by
flash memory thereby allowing the program to be stored on checking the number of connection breaks in the IR sensor
chip and hence reduces the development cost. The Wi-Fi pairs. The IR sensors are positioned in Line-of-Sight
module supports both Access Point (AP) mode and Station configuration. In general, they are conducting. When any
Mode. In our context, we have configured the module in obstacle enters in between, the connection breaks and more
station mode, where the module connects to the server breaks in a line compared to the other lanes implies that the
using TCP/IP protocol using HTTP at port 80 using an traffic is more in that lane and hence passage is given to
access point and streams the data. this line while the remaining lanes are blocked.

c. Priority Mode

This mode is most useful in cities which are also

administration headquarters and in general useful to give
way to the emergency vehicles such as ambulances. This
mode is implemented using RF technology. The logic is
simple and comfortable. We have four switches
corresponding to the four lanes. When corresponding switch
is pressed, then the lane will get passage and all the
remaining lanes are blocked. We can set the time interval
for this operation. After the prescribed duration elapsed, the
system goes back to previous mode (Normal or Congestion
based).

4. Results

The system is implemented using ATMEGA series

microcontroller for monitoring module and NodeMCU for
Figure 4: NODEMCU 32-bit Microcontroller
tracking module.
The data received from the GPS receiver is given
to a microcontroller. This data contains many sentences and
the microcontroller gathers the latitude and longitude from
the $GPSRMC (Recommended Minimum Data from GPS)
sentence. This latitude and longitude information is then
packed into a prescribed format and using a data stream
posted into the cloud server. The http://data.sparkfun.com is
a free cloud service provider. A user can create his data
stream in this cloud and can store data upto 50MB.

3.2 Monitoring Module

In this mode, the module will keep track of the

traffic. We assumed a 4 way junction in our
implementation. This module operates in three modes
namely Normal, Congestion-based and Priority modes.
Figure 5: Screenshot of data posted in cloud server at
a. Normal Mode data.sparkfun.com/mtech_track
In this mode, the traffic lights will change their The code is written using C programming language on
states based on pre-determined interval. This mode is useful Arduino IDE and the system is then tested for its accuracy.
when the traffic on all the lanes is uniform and traffic is tests proves that the system is doing well in all aspects and
moderate. This mode is similar to the normal traffic lights tracking data is successfully being posted into the cloud
operation we see in most of the areas in the city. The server. Figure 6 shows the screen shot of the data posted in
problem with this mode is that even when there is no traffic the cloud. We have created a data stream for the cloud with
in a particular lane, still the other lanes with traffic has to alias name “mtech_track” and used this stream to post the
wait. This will waste the time of the people. data.

b. Congestion-based mode
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Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY
 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2015): 6.391
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Venkatadri Institute of Technology,
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