Design and Deployment of Vehicular Internet of Things for Smart City Applications

A novel computing paradigm, called the Internet of things emerged a few years ago. IoT is materialized by connecting both real and digital worlds together. The deployment of IoT in vehicular networks has introduced a new vehicular communication technology-themed vehicular internet of things (V-IoT). With the introduction of miniaturized sensors and actuators, V-IoT has demonstrated the ability to improve the level of urban transport systems through the development and deployment of low-cost but powerful technologies which seamlessly upgrade the level of smart transportation in urban environments. In this research article, we have presented the features of V-IoT that encompass both the benefits and potential challenges of the technology. Low-cost IoT prototypes have been built and tested for numerous functions in vehicular environments. The monitored parameters include air, road conditions such as traffics flow sizes, air quality, weather parameters, and signal status in terms of Received signal strength indicator, and Signal noise ratio for both road and intra-vehicular environments. Devices are implemented at every IoT architectural layer and tested on a web-based IoT front-end application using different protocols like LoRaWAN. Two LoRa sensors have been deployed in the public bus to monitor some of the mentioned parameters on a real-time basis and historical data could be retrieved through the developed web-based dashboard. Simplistic algorithms are implemented for both real-time and historical data demonstration.