IRACST - International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology & Security (IJCSITS), ISSN: 2249-9555
Vol. 4, No.2, April 2014
Intelligent Traffic Control System using
Embedded Web Technology
P. Lakshmi Pallavi, Dr. Mohammed Ali Hussain,
[Link] (ES), Professor,
[Link] Electronics and Computer Engineering [Link] Electronics and Computer Engineering
KLEF University, Andhrapradesh, India. KLEF University, Andhrapradesh, India.
Abstract— with rapid economic development in many internet. Ultimately WWW is a set of standards used to
countries, transportation has increasingly become an communicate information. There are two primary actors when
extremely important component in the national economy communicating over WWW, the server and the client. For
and daily life. So it is very essential to build an intelligent right now think of the server and the client as two desktop
traffic control and monitoring system in order to resolve systems. The server system waits for the client system to
the traffic congestion of roads and reduce accidents. One initiate communication and then the client system makes a
major factor that affects the traffic flow is the request for information. If the server system understands the
management of the traffic at road intersections in a town request it replies with a response. If the server system does not
or city. In traditional traffic monitoring system, each understand the request it replies back to the client system with
intersection is controlled by its own controller which sends an error. This pattern is termed as the client-server model.
signals to the intersection’s traffic lights for changing their
states. Each intersection controller works independently of To transfer information in this request-response manner
each other with no way of being remotely monitored or both the web service and the web browser must talk the same
controlled. With the rise of the Internet technology, computer language. That language is called as Hypertext
embedded Web technology goes into the mainstream at Transfer Protocol or HTTP. HTTP is built on other standard
present, and various web scripts and servers support the protocols such as TCP/IP protocol. HTTP has 9 basic actions,
program running on an embedded device. The managers which are called methods that it supports; the most common
can manage and monitor traffic situations through the methods: GET and POST. A GET method makes request to
Web browsers. In this work we have utilized the emerging the server system to retrieve information. A POST method
embedded web server technology to design a web-based makes a request to change information on the server system.
traffic management system that can remotely control and The program that runs on the server system and can
monitor the traffic at various road intersections communicate over HTTP is called the web service. A web
simultaneously. The system is aimed at improving the service is an application used to handle web requests from the
traditional traffic monitoring system by incorporating client system and reply with a response determined by the web
better management and monitoring schemes as well as developer. You can start and stop the web service just like any
providing road users with real time information. other type of computer program.
Keywords— Embedded system, EWS, Flash ROM, TCP/ An embedded system is a computer designed for dedicated
IP, Web browser. functionality such as controlling or monitoring. Typically they
run a real-time operating system (RTOS) to allow for many
I. INTRODUCTION deterministic operations and high reliability. Similar to large
There is a lot of useful information freely available about website publishers like Yahoo, Google, or Facebook,
what the web is, how it came about, and the many nuances of embedded systems have information that needs to be shared
what it means to use one technology over another. The with the external systems. Two common examples of such
Internet and the web are commonly interchanged despite external systems would include human-machine interfaces
being different parts of the same system. The Internet is (HMIs) and the supervisory control and data acquisition
infrastructure of hardware system that facilitates sending (SCADA) systems. Both external system types need to
information. This hardware fits together to make the computer communicate with the embedded devices, but their
networks that in turn use Internet protocols such as TCP/IP requirements dictate different design decisions when using
and UDP/IP. “The Web” is short for the World Wide Web or web technology. In this paper we have utilized the emerging
WWW and it is complementary to the Internet. It is the series embedded web server technology [1] [2] to design a traffic
of various interlinked documents accessed through the control and monitoring system that can remotely control and
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IRACST - International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology & Security (IJCSITS), ISSN: 2249-9555
Vol. 4, No.2, April 2014
monitor the traffic at various road intersections impractical due to the memory overhead required and, in some
simultaneously. The proposed system is aimed at improving cases, to the lack of system support for multiple processes.
the traditional traffic monitoring system by incorporating
better management and monitoring schemes as well as
providing road users with real time information. B. Reliability and Portability
Generally computer network devices require high
II. RELATED WORK reliability. As one embedded component of the network
In [3], the authors built a traffic surveillance technology device, embedded server also must be highly reliable. Because
system based on wireless sensors. Their system was deployed it is a subordinate process, at least it must protect propagation
in freeways and at intersections for traffic measurements such of the internal failure to the whole system. EWS needs to run
as vehicle occupancy, count, speed, and vehicle classification on a much broader range of the embedded system in RTOS
which can’t be obtained from standard inductive loops. In [4], environments that vary widely in terms of the facilities they
the authors proposed a traffic control system that depends on provide, and with much tighter resource constraints than
the traffic information collected from the WSN to achieve a mainstream computing hardware. So it needs high portability.
real time adaptive traffic control. In [5], the authors presented
a new system that applied to the traffic control allowed C. Security
designing and developing systems with a high level of EWS must provide a mechanism to limit access to sensitive
autonomy and intelligent. The capacities of these kinds of Data or configuration control. EWS should look to incorporate
system to manage and get acknowledge about traffic control Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol, which ensure a secure
were huge. socket connection between the browser and the Web server.
There is also Secure-HTTP, an extension of HTTP for both
In [6], the suthors presented the design and implementation authentication and data encryption between a Web server and
of a sensor network system for monitoring the flow of the a Web browser. Even public and private cryptography
traffic through temporary construction work zones. Also, they technologies can be leveraged to control access to managed
implemented software architecture in TinyOS/ nesC for device. There are different levels of security in the Web
collecting a variety of traffic statistics, such as density, flow, environment from no security to simple, medium and strong
vehicle trajectories, etc. In [7], the authors proposed an security. Embedded web server developer must take into
algorithm for preprocessing the traffic monitoring system that account for what security level is moderate to the Web-based
provided a set of services requests that were submitted element management system.
simultaneously, like vehicle statistics, road traffic conditions,
accident zone detection etc. Our proposed solution eliminated
redundancies among similar requests efficiently and IV. ROPOSED WORK
effectively thus reduced communication cost and increased The intelligent traffic control and monitoring system
network lifetime. proposed in this paper consists of a master unit and a number
of slave units sparsely located at different geographical sites
III. EMBEDDED WEB SERVER and interconnected together through the internet. The master
A Web server can be embedded in to a device to provide node is the Central Traffic Management Unit (CTMU) used to
remote access to the device from a Web browser if the remotely monitor and control the different nodes using the
resource requirements of the Web server are reduced. The end internet technology as the communication backbone, as shown
result of this reduction is typically a portable set of program in Figure 1.
code that can run on the embedded systems with limited
computing resources. The embedded system can be utilized to Each node is equipped with a EWS which is responsible for
serve the embedded Web documents, including static and monitoring and controlling the traffic sensors, traffic signals,
dynamic information about embedded systems, to the Web camera and/or the electronic variable message sign (EVMS)
browsers. located at a specific intersection as shown in Figure 2. In this
configuration, the CTMU acts as the client node while each
A. Resource Scarcity node act as a server in a client-server model.
The development of embedded web server (EWS) must
take into account the relative scarcity of the computing
resources. Embedded server must meet the device’s memory
requirements and limited processing power. General-purpose
Web servers have evolved toward a multi-threaded system
architecture that either dedicates a separate thread to each
incoming connection, or uses a thread pool to handle a set of
connections with a smaller number of threads. Thread or
single process to every incoming connection is usually
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IRACST - International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology & Security (IJCSITS), ISSN: 2249-9555
Vol. 4, No.2, April 2014
remote monitoring system completes the data collection in the
embedded platform and then provides the data to remote host
through the TCP/IP protocol from Web server. It creates a
condition to realize unattended management.
Figure 1: EWS Traffic Management System
Figure 3: The structure of EWS traffic monitoring system
B. Embedded Web Server Hardware
Figure 2: EWS in a node Embedded web server hardware system includes an
embedded ARM processor, DRAM, Flash ROM, Ethernet
Each EWS facilitates the process of sending and receiving port, front terminal application system components and bus
data to and from remote locations and exchange information controller, as shown in Figure [Link] processor is Samsung
with one another via the CTMU, hereby, traffic problems can S3C44B0X ARM7 that is suitable for quite poor working
be detected, analyzed and corrected quickly. The ESW of environment, supports uCLinux operating system, and it runs
every master and slave node is identified by its unique IP faster than 8-bit and 16-bit processor.
address and can be controlled remotely by CTMU. The
embedded server send and receive the desired information
using HTML documents which has the ability to be generated
dynamically using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
HTTP protocol is the protocol that is used to allow the
management unit to request status or control the web servers
at the different nodes. The embedded web server must include
enough memory to hold the software that facilitates its
networking ability. An optimized TCP/IP stack is
implemented into the web server ROM. In addition, external
DRAM is required for buffering the incoming data, while an
external flash memory is needed to store the html web
information and the traffic signal control application software.
The management unit will act as the web client when
monitoring and controlling the nodes via a standard web
browser. Figure 4 : Hardware System
A. System Structure C. Embedded Web Server Software
Our traffic monitoring (Figure 3) system consists of the EWS gathers real-time status information and then
data acquisition equipment (for multiple devices), remote delivers them to the external database server. This method can
monitoring host and the local Web server. The embedded easily make use of the database management software
installed on the database server to implement data storage and
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IRACST - International Journal of Computer Science and Information Technology & Security (IJCSITS), ISSN: 2249-9555
Vol. 4, No.2, April 2014
management. Nevertheless, that happens at the cost of low embedded WEB technology with Internet to implement
real-time response capacity because of frequent data remote traffic control and monitoring through the Web Server
interaction between the embedded server and the external applications. Therefore managerial personnel can have the
database server. Figure 5 explains the structure of the remote real-time monitoring and control of traffic
embedded web system and the embedded database management through Web browsers without time and
management software transplanted in embedded web server is geographical constraints.
responsible for data storage and management. Embedded
database management software has some special
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Figure 5: Software System
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