Sensors on wheels { towards a zero-infrastructure solution for intelligent transportation systems

Traffic congestion has become a part of daily life of most of us. One possible way of preventing congestion from building up is by disseminating traffic information. Today a number of commercial solutions exist for disseminating traffic information (e.g., Traffic.com, Metrocommute, EtakTraffic). However, these solutions are plagued by prohibitive deployment and maintenance cost that prevents widespread deployment. As a result, these solutions cover select highways while leaving out major fractions of the highways. In this paper we present our vision of a low cost, highly scalable zero-infrastructure system for collecting and disseminating information about traffic conditions. Our goal is to devise a system that can cover the entire road network of the US. We describe the proposed architecture for the system, and evaluate it using a micro-traffic simulator and a calibrated model of the South Jersey transportation network.