An efficient traffic monitoring and control system using aerial platforms and vertical arrays

In this paper, a reliable traffic monitoring system is proposed based on aerial platform (AP) wireless sensor network with a new adaptive vertical linear array beamforming technique. This proposed beamforming technique improves the system performance compared with recent techniques using the same number of antenna elements which makes aerial platforms more feasible to establish wireless sensor network for traffic monitoring application. Four coverage scenarios of the proposed AP traffic monitoring system are examined at coverage diameters of 16 and 60 km and two bit rates of 38.4 and 250 kb/s. The simulation results depicts better performance of the proposed antenna technique in all the four examined coverage scenarios. At the worst case (60 km coverage diameter, 2400 MHz frequency and bit rate of 250 kb/s), the probability of bit-energy to noise-spectral-density ( $$E_{b}/N_{o})$$ E b / N o ) to be less than 4 dB is zero for the proposed technique while it was 0.14 in the case of optimized concentric circular array technique and 0.76 for the conventional spot-beam antenna. Also, at the coverage diameter of 16 km and bit rate of 38.4 kb/s at 868 MHz, the results show that the probability of $$E_{b}/N_{o}