JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 3, ISSUE 12, DECEMBER 2011, ISSN 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.

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Minimization of Waiting Time in Traffic Signals on Indian roads based on Wireless Sensor Network
Amnesh Goel, Sukanya Ray and Nidhi Chandra
Abstract: The rapid growth of vehicles is leading to huge traffic and increasing traffic congestion, to solve this chaotic traffic congestion a wireless sensor based traffic signal solution is proposed in this paper. The primary motive of this paper is to minimize the waiting time for vehicles at traffic signal and optimization control of duration of a green traffic light timing based on the volume of the vehicles passing through that junction in a given period of time. In this paper Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is used to make traffic signal fully adaptive to the traffic movement at a junction and thus maximize the volume of traffic flow through that signal and utilization green time effectively. Index Terms: WSN, Traffic signal, congestion, Adaptive.

1. INTRODUCTION
n the last decade due to the rapid rate of increase of vehicles, traffic management has become a serious area of concern for traffic police. This huge traffic leads to large traffic congestion especially in the morning when school and offices starts for the day and again in the evening when the schools and offices close or in peak hours. Wider roads are being constructed to reduce this chaotic situation but the cost and effort needed for this is very high and moreover during the process of this construction the traffic flow is disrupted leading to more chaotic situation and traffic congestion. In addition to this the time taken by authorities to complete these extension of roads is long enough and within that time period the ratio of traffic increase largely and condition gets worse than it was earlier and then even by spending huge cost in extension there is no relief for the common man from this congestion. Attempts are being made to decrease the number of vehicles on road by various awareness programs conducted by government authorities from time to time to emphasize on people more on the usage of public transport in comparison to private transport and have also taken various actions in that direction by increasing bus services, better and effective train transport and car pool[1] in various routes, so that lot of person can go in a single vehicle at a time instead of each taking out his/her own car for the same route. It has been noticed that 8% of total commuters move by their own cars and they are occupying 72% area of

Amnesh Goel is with Amity School Of Engineering & Technology, Amity University, Noida (U.P.), India. Sukanya Ray is with Amity School Of Engineering & Technology, Amity University, Noida (U.P.), India. Nidhi Chandra is with is with Amity School Of Engineering & Technology, Amity University, Noida (U.P.), India.

road. Still this problem exists at large and can only be reduced to some extent if we use the existing road architecture to its full capacity but at the grass root level it is not that easy to change the basic infrastructure of roads and design them according to present need because if any such changes are planned then it will be very expensive and also at the same time it will cause a lot of inconvenience to the public. Hence, looking for this problem, in this paper with the help of Wireless Sensor Network a method has been proposed that will utilize the existing road architecture and help in synchronizing the traffic flow adaptively. There are two types of traffic modeling: Microscopic[1] traffic modeling and Macroscopic[2][3] traffic modeling. In this paper the proposed idea is based on the macroscopic traffic modeling. Sensor nodes in Wireless Sensor Network are small in size, low on energy consumption and can be deployed in any location on road. The sensors to be used run on both battery power as well as solar energy consumption device so that it can use sunlight to draw energy for functioning during the day time and save the battery power for use at night or in gloomy condition when there is not enough sunlight for its proper functioning, which will also result in increased longevity of the sensor nodes. Sensors for traffic signals[10] are generally of two types: i) Intrusive type and ii) Non- Intrusive type. i) Intrusive type: These sensors are buried under the roads and detect the presence of the traffic waiting at the signal and thus can reduce the waiting time when green signal is given to an empty road. This type of sensor is works on the same principle as that of a metal detector. ii) NonIntrusive type: Unlike intrusive sensor, this type of sensor is fitted over road way instead of cutting the road and fitting it under the road, hence this is also cost effective. This type of sensor includes video image processors or acoustic sensors to detect the presence of vehicles waiting at the traffic route. Non-intrusive

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sensors are preferred over intrusive sensors as they are immune to natural degradation and have the capacity to act as real-time traffic management devices and also can collect data which are not available from inroadway sensors. Amount of traffic load on roads and mismanagement of green light time at traffic signal point leads to one more major area of concern for traffic police, which is jumping of red light which is a key issue from safety point of view. Common man being on a hurry is running short of time and in such situation wastage of time at traffic signal intersection forces a person to lose his/her patience and jump red light because they were waiting for their turn to move and on other hand there is not a single vehicle to pass from the green light route, thus sometimes resulting in accidents. To overcome this problem, usually traffic police issues challan to drivers for breaking rules but this is not a solution to this problem because there is no fault of the accused when the opposite route of the intersection is idle and the vehicles on this side have to wait unnecessarily. So, such a system is required which controls traffic light in such a way that they switch from red to green or vice versa according to the volume of traffic on road. Although they will follow the basic principal of having a static amount of time for each intersection but this time period will rotate between all the routes of intersection dynamically to provide an optimum utilization of green light time. Most recent approaches to solve the traffic problem have used computation and communication for trying to make travel automated. Researchers are talking about making vehicle intelligent so that they can communicate with the intersection traffic signal and get the direction according to their destination, but this kind of system could not solve the problem for optimization of green time at traffic signal. From those literatures it can be concluded that only full automation by decreasing the control of driver and increasing intelligent vehicular movement can greatly reduce this problem, but based on the economic condition and infrastructure of India, fully automation by increasing intelligent vehicles is not possible as they will be too highly priced and thus out of the reach of common people. In this paper the existing architecture that is the traffic signals are used and new infrastructure such as sensor nodes on the roads are incorporated along with the existing infrastructure. By this with minimum automation the existing infrastructure is made intelligent and which thus help in controlling traffic flow. So at low cost a solution to the problem can be achieved.

2. EXISTING APPROACHES
In the traffic signal monitoring application, the traffic flow can be monitored and controlled with the help of sensors and generally two types of sensors[4] are used in this case: i) sensors are placed on the road in the monitored area ii) to place the sensors on the vehicles

and the vehicles collect data and send it to the central unit as they travel on the road.[5] There are basically two types of signal control method: i) periodic signal control ii) sensor based signal control. The periodic signal method is not able to adapt the dynamic flow of traffic, and so it works well on non- busy roads. The sensor based signal on the other hand can adapt to the traffic flow and thus help in traffic management and also reduce the un- necessary waiting time of the vehicles. The following methods are some of the most efficient sensor based signaling methods proposed so far. 2.1 Intersecting Signal Control: For a four route intersection there is four types of signal (stop, go forward, go left and go right) and for each route the signal duration can be set so that all vehicles waiting at the intersection can pass. The sensors placed along the road will record the speed of the passing vehicles and from there it will calculate the time required for each vehicle to reach the intersection. This information is required to calculate the exact signal duration for the different types of signals. The dynamic signal duration for each signal route minimizes the waiting time of the vehicles at the signal intersection.[6] 2.2 City Traffic Congestion Control: This is a priority based signaling system where priority of each route of the signaling system is based on different traffic parameters and the route with the highest priority (calculated by the weightage of each vehicle like ambulance and VIP vehicles will get a weightage 8 and other vehicles get a weightage 1 multiplied by the number of vehicles in the route and the waiting time of each vehicle ) is given the green signal first for a certain computed duration so that all the waiting vehicles of that route can pass. But this process has a major drawback that is if there is a medical unit at any route then the flow of ambulance along that route will be more and the performance of the whole system will degrade due to the higher assigned priority. [7] 2.3 Urban Traffic Control System: This is another popular approach where the citys traffic system is divided into N blocks according to the layout of the citys roads and buildings. Many sensors and signal lights are distributed in each block and one sensor in each block is made the sensor head which will manage the other sensors and signals. The sensor nodes are the active agents that send signals to the sensor head and the signals are the passive agents that receive and display the signal from the sensor head. The task of the sensor head is to collect, compute the data and make decision based on the local control strategy of each block. The drawback of this proposed idea is that it is a centralized system and so if the sensor head fails or is damaged then the whole system crashes until there a next sensor head is selected or the sensor head is repaired. [8]

3. KEY CONCEPT FOR PROPOSED METHOD

Traffic signals are used to control the flow of traffic at each arm of intersection and avoid collision between

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them. Each arm of intersection have to wait for a certain fix period of time for a green light and again in a static amount of time it reach red light again and this cycle continues for whole day and sometimes duration of each arm can vary as per the traffic load from that direction but again that is bound by a fix period of time. In all the traffic junctions a lot of time is wasted as the waiting time of these vehicles is determined by the fixed timer of the traffic signal at that junction. Fixed time traffic signal is not properly utilized in India as vehicles have to wait for their turn to go even if there are no vehicles left in the green-lighted junction.

Fig 4.1 Three Intersections having non-uniform traffic.

Fig 3.1: Route has no traffic but the signal is green

The problem of these traffic signals is that, its time is fixed and independent of the traffic on that junction. This unnecessary wait can lead to impatient drivers breaking the law by crossing the junction and making a move even though the signal is still red and in the worst scenario this can lead to even accident. However in this paper an idea is being proposed for making the traffic signals intelligent and adaptive [9] to the route traffic by the help of Wireless Sensor Network.

4. PROPOSED SYSTEM MODEL

Traffic congestion and the unnecessary wastage of time due to the waiting time at each traffic junction is a major area of concern. The existing traffic signals work on a fixed timing basis, which means that an equal time slot is provided for each route. This method is very efficient for those intersections where the traffic flow is uniform from all sides but this same process is highly inefficient when it comes to intersections having non-uniform traffic flow at each route. Hence the traffic signal need to be adaptive in nature and in this paper based on the sensors a new model is being proposed to make the signals adaptive to the traffic in each route but before moving on with that approach, an analogy of current system is shown in fig 3.1.

Three different traffic signal points are identified in fig. 3.1 viz. T1, T2, T3 having four arms each 1,2,3,4 for T1; 5,6,7,8 for T2 and a, b, c, d for T3. Traffic load on each traffic signal arm is non-uniform and these lights are having a fix time interval for each side of intersection. For the traffic intersection T1, the traffic load is very high on arm no. 2, 4 while arm 3 having less traffic and arm 1 not having any traffic. Now, in this kind of situation if 60 passing seconds are allowed for each side then definitely 60 seconds will be very less for arm 2 and 4 which are having high traffic but when it comes to arm 3 then it may be such that the complete traffic of this arm can move out in less time than the fixed 60 seconds and signal of this arm will remain idle to green for remaining of the allotted 60 seconds and situation is very worst in case of arm 1 because there is no traffic, hence 60 seconds allotted for this arm is totally wasted. For the traffic intersection T2, traffic load is high on arm no. 8 and rest of the arms either has very least traffic load or no traffic. Again here is same situation as discussed earlier and fix time allocation for each side will be resulting in wastage of time. Same nature can be study for the traffic intersection point t3. So, to avoid such situation, one solution is that, traffic police first read the behavior of traffic on each intersection and then adjust the time interval for each side of traffic intersection point but again they are bound to allot a fix time period, only what they could do is, they can either increase or decrease the green light time as per the nature of traffic for a particular side/ arm of intersection. But this is not a permanent solution for the problem stated because this will be having again a fix time period for each arm of intersection point independent of traffic load; so, in this paper a new method is proposed from which this problem can be solved. Proposed method is considering all the possible cases for traffic load on intersection points and making

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traffic light fully adaptive on the basis of traffic load and there will be automatically switching of light from green to red depending on traffic load and vice versa. Considering traffic intersection point T3 which is having four arms viz. a, b, c, d and they are facing nonuniform load of traffic. In this type of situation, sensors will be installed at two places, first at the traffic light itself to monitor the coming traffic of a particular side and second at the 50 meters from intersection towards face of traffic light.

activate as soon as green light will active. They will keep on sensing the traffic for entire green light time and if any point of time they doesnt find any traffic for continue 5 seconds then they will assume that no more traffic is to pass for this round and they will trigger an event to main intersection sensor and will ask for switch light mode to look and go from green light. 5 second threshold value is taken by assuming that in 5 seconds either that 50 meters queue of traffic will empty or will leave very few vehicles behind. In this way there will be perfect optimal utilization of green light time because generally it has experienced on roads that one side is having green light but there is no vehicle to pass on and mostly at that time usually drivers of other arms side of intersection breaks rule and jumps red light, so, this point address the key problem.

5. DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK

Key problem on the Indian roads is optimal utilization on traffic signal because there is wastage of time due to non-uniformity in traffic. Solutions proposed to avoid such situation dont address it completely and still there was incomplete use of green light time at traffic intersection. So, to address such situation proposed method has two concepts from which green light time will utilize optimistically and that is, before to switch to next arm of intersection, first check whether there is any traffic to move or not and second is if one green light side road have got empty then immediately switch to next light with help of line of sight sensors. TABLE 1 COMPARISON TABLE OF PROPOSED METHOD WITH OTHER EXISTING MODELS.

Fig. 4.2 Intersection having non-uniform load of traffic along with line of sight sensor location.

In fig. 3.2, four arms are identified in form of a, b, c, d and four line of sight sensors are installed on each road side (approx. at 50 meters) in red color. Two concepts are proposed in this paper. First is, before getting light from red to green for any side, it will first check whether there is any traffic to pass or not, and if there is no traffic at that arm side light for that particular switching then that side wont experience green light and it will remain red and pass the turn to next arm of intersection. In this way, if any arm doesnt have any traffic to pass, then that side road will not get green light time and automatically green light time will pass to next arms traffic. During the early morning time or in late night time, it may possible that all the side of intersection point doesnt have any traffic then this will under an infinite loop condition and no side will experience green time, so to avoid that situation if all n side of intersection point results in passing the green light time then all the sides will automatically switch to look and go mode and whenever continuous traffic will come from any side then it will back to normal mode. In this way, complete green time wastage can stop and time can effectively use. Second concept is, when one arm has got green light time but dont have adequate volume of traffic for that time slot then there will be wastage of green time because there will be no traffic to pass. Hence, to avoid such situation, sensors will be install in line of sight mode approx. at 50 meters from intersection point (refer fig. 3.2 red mark on each side.) and they will get

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For the extension of this work, one may implement this at ground level and can see performance of traffic intersection light and one feature should include in this for Indian roads and that is priority to vehicles. In this paper, vehicles are treated under same priority.

REFERENCES
[1] Arvind Giridhar, PR Kumar , Scheduling Automated Traffic on a Network of Roads IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technology vol 55 no5, page 1467-1474 [2] G. Newell, A simplified theory of kinematic waves in highway traffic, Part 1: General theory Transpn. Res. B, vol. 27, 1993. [3] B. Kerner, P. Kornhauser, Structure and parameters of cluster in traffic flow Phys. Rev. E, vol. 50, pp. 54.83, 1994. [4] Sharma, A., Chaki, R., Bhattacharya, U. Applications of Wireless Sensor Network in Intelligent Traffic System: A Review Electronics Computer Technology (ICECT), 2011 3rd International Conference on Issue Date: 8-10 April 2011 On page(s): 53 - 57 Print ISBN: 978-1-42448678-6 [5] T. Rabie, B. Abdulhai, A. Shalaby, A. El-Rabbany, Mobile active-vision traffic surveillance system for urban networks, Proc. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, July 2005, vol. 20, Issue 4, pp. 231241. [6] CHEN Wenjie, CHEN Lifeng, CHEN Zhanglong and TU Shiliang, A Realtime Dynamic Traffic Control System Based on Wireless Sensor Network, Proc. International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops, 2005, pp. 258-264. [7] Abishek C, Mukul Kumar and Kumar Padmanabh, City Traffic Congestion Control in Indian Scenario using Wireless Sensors Network, Fifth IEEE Conference on Wireless Communication and Sensor Networks (WCSN), 2009, pp. 1-6. [8] Jingyu Liu and Yanjun Fang, Urban Traffic Control System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Information Acquisition, Aug 2006, pp. 295-300. [9] Binbin Zhou, Jiannong Cao, Xiaoqin Zeng, Hejun Wu Adaptive Traffic Light Control in Wireless Sensor Network-Based Intelligent Transportation System Vehicular Technology Conference Fall (VTC 2010-Fall), 2010 IEEE 72nd Issue Date: 6-9 Sept. 2010 On page(s): 1 - 5 ISSN: 1090-3038 Print ISBN: 978-1-4244-3573-9 [10] Sensor node information available via www at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light_control_and_c oordination.

Amnesh Goel is pursuing M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering at Amity School of Engineering & Technology, Amity University, Noida. He has received MCA, M.Sc degree from Maharshi Dayanand University, Rohtak in 2010 and 2009 respectively. He has done BCA and B.Sc from IGNOU, Delhi and Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut respectively in 2007. He has more than 2 years experience in administration. His current research includes in Image Encryption, MANET, sensor network and Data Mining. Sukanya Ray is currently pursuing M.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering at Amity School of Engineering & Technology, Amity University, Noida. She has received B.Tech degree from IMPS College of Engineering and Technology, WBUT in 2010. Her current research includes in MANET, sensor network and Genetic Algorithm.

Ms. Nidhi Chandra has more than 7 years experience in academic and Software Development. She is M.Tech from CDAC NOIDA, affiliated from GGSIPU, Delhi .Presently she is working as Assistant Professor at Amity University Noida. She has Worked with Tata Unisys and CDAC Noida Her research interest includes Natural Language Processing, Assistive Technology and Semantic Web Based Application.