Overview / Usage

Idea

Create a large network with mobile sensor nodes installed inside vehicles connected to each other in order to detect, analyze and send data automatically and anonymously in data collection centers through check-points placed on smart roads.
The aim is to have as much data as possible on air quality, fine dusts, km driven by vehicles, and on which roads mainly; Data collection centers will be checkpoints on smart roads.
Smart roads connected with 5G technology allow vehicles to connect and send data, this idea will also allow to report data about vehicles that generally do not hit external roads (highways for example) and, therefore, remaining more in the city accumulate interesting amounts of routes citizen data.

Description

Continuous technological advances in miniaturization and in the construction of low energy consumption circuits and the continuous progress in the field of information coupled with the high level of efficiency achieved by radio communication devices, increasingly affirm a new technological perspective: Sensor networks (WSN - Wireless sensor network).
This technology arise from the fact that electronic devices are becoming smaller and more complex, and the tendency is to distribute intelligence into objects with relatively lower computing power but strongly related each other, instead of bring it together to a single expensive unit, cumbersome and hardly manageable; The birth of WSN is due to a basic idea which involves the use of a large number of nodes, allowing to perform reliefs and elaborations with greater precision and frequency than the single sensor case of use, capable of providing better performances at detriment of higher costs.
All those premise is the logic from which the project starts, distributing analysis and reliefs among multiple mobile nodes (related vehicles) that converge acquired data into defined checkpoints (points on the smart roads) connected to data collections center.
Mobile nodes consist essentially of:

• Processor (CPU): usually represented by a microcontroller that performs all management functions, including translation of transducers electrical signals, actuator management and communication control.

• Memory: Represents a volatile memory block that acts as an aid to execution.

• Transducers: can be more than one, transform some physical dimension (temperature, gps perpendicular paths, air quality, fine dust pad etc etc) into an electrical signal.

• Actuators: they can be more than one and of a different kind (Leds, acoustic sonar etc..).

• Communication Unit: Allows inter-node communication.

Network description

One of the primary features of this network type is the management of logical addressing and routing of packets.
In a WSN, addressing can follow a particular technique, so the network is partitioned into node clusters and for each cluster it is assigned a unique address.
In every cluster there is a coordinator that collects data from nodes and directs them to the collection center or possibly to the cluster group coordinator to which it belongs.
In this way, the address space is safeguarded while retaining the possibility of referring to certain portions of the network. A typical application example is showed in the picture (down-below).
Here, in fact, there is a practical application where clusters are grouped together in a large network. Red-circled knots act as coordinators for top-level clusters, while blue circled nodes act as coordinators for second-level clusters (the largest external ones) until they reach the data collection center.
As for the routing algorithms, it was chosen a hybrid typology, that is an algorithm that allows to interface, create nodes whenever encounters a mobile node and to communicate and understand if that node will reach first the data collection center.