17th Telecommunications forum TELFOR 2009 Serbia, Belgrade, November 24-26, 2009. Abstract — Traffic regulations represent formal control of motor vehicle traffic worldwide. Their violations are one of the key reasons for traffic accidents causing human losses and material damages. Therefore, the monitoring of traffic regulations can substantially increase the traffic safety and provide intelligent traffic management. Recent developments in vehicular communications, as well as the production of high performance sensors, led to novel ideas in the corresponding area. This paper shows an applicative solution for traffic regulations monitoring using a Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN). The solution is tested on a small testbed realized with SunSPOTs and several other sensors available off-the-shelf. Keywords — VANET, VSN, Sensors, Traffic regulations monitoring, SunSPOT. I. INTRODUCTION raffic accidents cause losses of thousands of lives and huge material damages every year. One of the key reasons for majority of traffic accidents are the violations of traffic regulations. Therefore, having an efficient way to detect violations will yield reductions of traffic accidents and enable intelligent traffic management. Recent advances in telecommunications, computing and sensor technology emerged the vehicular environment as an attractive research field for the communications community. They led to a definition of an entirely new communicating paradigm, i.e. vehicular communications, which can increase passenger safety and provide “smarter” road and regulations monitoring. In the past decade, the wireless ad–hoc networking has been established as a candidate technology for networking vehicles. Its characteristics support self-organization among dynamic and autonomous devices (in this case vehicles). In the near future, Vehicular Ad–hoc NETworks (VANETs) will provide means for development of a large variety of vehicular applications ranging from transport automation systems to entertainment and comfort based applications [1]. An extension of VANETs exploiting the usage of various sensors that sense road and vehicle phenomena and send sensor data to relevant entities (e.g. users, institutions etc.) represents the Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs). VSNs greatly affect the emerging traffic regulations monitoring issues [2, 3]. For example, the most prominent tool for monitoring the use of road regulations nowadays All authors are with the Ss Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies, Macedonia (phone: 389-2-3099114; fax: 389-2-3064262; e-mail: liljana@feit.ukim.edu.mk) . (besides traffic police) is video surveillance. Many countries’ transportation departments have implemented video cameras on the roads (especially city crossroads) which are usually a part of a Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) network [4, 5]. Even though the extensive usage of CCTV for traffic regulations monitoring proved to lead to a decrease of traffic violation, its possibilities are limited. VSNs allow ubiquitous road sensing and enable more diverse applications and regulations policing. This paper proposes a traffic regulations monitoring solution based on a VSN. The solution encompasses several sensor technologies to provide efficient data gathering from the vehicular environment and to disseminate the gathered information to relevant authorities. The whole approach is tested on a custom built VSN testbed with components already available on the market. The paper is organized as follows. Section II briefly discusses some of the main VSN challenges that greatly affect the possibilities to realistically create a VSN application. Section III elaborates on a novel application for traffic regulations monitoring named Smart Road Monitoring (SRM) and the testbed created as a proof-of- concept. Finally, section IV concludes the paper and gives some possible future guidelines. II. VSNS’ IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES AND CONSTRAINTS In order to have a real world implementation of a VSN based application, a number of technical issues need to be resolved. The vehicular environment is very specific in its nature. It is characterized with high and spatially structured mobility of nodes that leads to a very dynamic topology of the network [6]. This dynamic topology invokes a variety of technical issues such as establishing a fully functional routing algorithm, maintaining end–to–end connectivity and scalability etc [7, 8]. Contrary to the constraints the mobility produces, power consumption is not a crucial issue at the vehicle since the battery provides sufficient energy [9]. This empowers designers with the ability to use more resource demanding protocols and techniques. According to the previously stated constraints, each VSN application needs to resolve these challenges. Depending on the application characteristics, a different design philosophy (that deals only with the constraints being imposed in front of the application being developed) can be used. The following section will elaborate on a VSN based application for efficient traffic regulations monitoring called Smart Road Monitoring (SRM). The SRM application combines ad–hoc networking with a Traffic Regulations Monitoring Using VSNs Bisera Jankuloska, Milan Zahariev, Aleksandra Mateska, Vladimir Atanasovski, Student Member, IEEE, and Liljana Gavrilovska, Member, IEEE T 1474