Advanced formation and delivery of traffic information in intelligent transportation systems

To meet the safety requirement for the increasing traffic densities nowadays, there exists a growing demand for advanced systems that can provide drivers essential traffic and travel information to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. In this paper, we combine the video analysis and multimedia networking technologies to present a highly integrated intelligent system that can achieve the above goals. For traffic information, the system presented in this paper collects traffic parameters and detects relevant events by analyzing traffic surveillance videos. Through robust tracking algorithms and reasoning logics, important traffic parameters and events are extracted from the surveillance videos accurately. Afterwards, summarized real-time traffic conditions and important events along with corresponding live traffic videos are formed into layers and multicasted through an integration of WiMAX infrastructure and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). By the support of adaptive modulation and coding in WiMAX, the radio resources can be optimally allocated when performing multicast so as to dynamically adjust the number of data layers received by users. In addition to multicast supported by WiMAX, we also design a knowledge propagation and information relay scheme by VANET. Through this relaying technology, about 80% of the mobile stations that were unable to subscribe additional layers of data due to insufficient downlink bandwidth from WiMAX could regain more than 90% of the data in the additional layers within tolerable buffering time. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.