A Wireless Sensor Network Architecture for Highway Intersection Collision Prevention

With a growing number of vehicles entering roadways, it is important to take the initiative to decrease the number of collisions occurring on them. Intersections, in particular, are notorious for collisions. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of human driver behavior, there is limited technology capable of addressing this problem today. In rural areas, where non-stopping highways intersect with lower-traffic channels, the high speeds of the highway traffic make crossing and merging onto the road treacherous. Failure to yield to the higher priority traffic, for any reason, can have dire consequences. This paper describes a wireless intersection collision avoidance system (WICAS), an intelligent transportation system (ITS) technology to help mitigate collisions at intersections, particularly rural highway intersections based on a Kalman prediction algorithm that receives updated position and velocity estimates from deployed sensors.