A smartphone-based system for traffic congestion control using RFID tags

Traffic congestion represents a major problem for most urban areas. Due to the growing number of vehicles, handling this issue is a necessity. Recently, detecting traffic congestions has been noticeably studied considering different radar technologies. However, up to now none of the previous studies dealt with solving traffic jam issues using a smartphone application for notifications. Researches that have been conducted in this field used only passive tags that are highly resource-constrained. Furthermore, they do not comply with the latest technologies of smartphones. These technologies represent an easy way to make the user aware about a traffic jam in a specific road. The purpose of this paper is to fill-up this gap and contribute to reducing traffic congestion in big cities by proposing a sequential approach intended to identify, control, and manage traffic congestion. The suggested system considers active Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and smartphone application technologies. The RFID tag is installed on both vehicles and concerned roads to record the necessary data and provide the user of the application with the detailed analyses of congestion patterns and traffic mobility.