1st International Conference on Applied Engineering

and Natural Sciences

https://www.icaens.com/ November 1-3, 2021, Konya, Turkey

A Proposed Solution for a Safety Traffic Control

System Using IoT (STCS)
Ali Abedalaziz Alsarhan1, Mousa Tayseer Jafar 2 and Mohammad Al-Fawa'reh3
1
Information Technology University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan
2
Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan
ORCID ID 0000-0002-0408-0541
3
Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan
*
(mou20178003@std.psut.edu.jo) Email of the corresponding author

Abstract – The number of road crashes is growing daily. As a result, millions of people die in road crashes
each year around the world. To address this problem, we propose the "STCS" model that is trying to prevent
human error and provide more time for drivers to react in emergencies during the driving process to
minimize the number of road crashes. STCS will connect all the vehicles through the 5G mobile network
with expected 1ms end-to-end latency and 90% reduction in network energy usage; 5G technology will be
the dominant way of communication globally. Data will be sent from vehicles to web services to be
analyzed and processed to send a timely alert to the vehicle that is likely to be at risk. The transactions will
contain data about road conditions, driver, and vehicle readings based on the sensors equipped with each
vehicle. STCS will be connected to each vehicle through a mobile device, and the mobile will be connected
to the car using a custom-built chip to read the data. Thus, STCS will make the old vehicles support the
Internet of Things (IoT) revolution and minimize road crashes.

Keywords –5G, Vehicles, IoT, Internet of Things.

I. INTRODUCTION through the mobile devices that are connected

In this paper, we propose the STCS system as a
future solution for a currently happening problem.
Since we live in a world of intelligent technologies,
everything should be bright and intelligent enough
to keep up with the rapid change in the information
technology field. Nowadays, we have smartphones,
smart homes, and we can make anything clever with
hi-tech capabilities. With the IoT [1], we will be
able to interact smoothly with the surrounding
objects of the intelligent world, and this technology
revolution requires a fast way to transfer data
between these intelligent objects in a fast and
efficient way. The future 5G technology [2]
produces the capability of fast data transfer but is yet
to be standardized in the future. The STCS system
will be provided with a web service to control
exchanging the data and the data processing, to keep
the connection available between the vehicles
directly to the vehicle’s computer (ECU) [3] to
intervene at the right time to prevent any upcoming
road accidents. Usually, providing more safety to
the drivers by such systems revolves around
reducing the delay between an emergency event and
the moment at which the drivers around should be
notified to react. Providing more time to the drivers
to react earlier by broadcasting alerts, notifications,
traffic data, or any information that is related to the
current road situation to help in providing more
safety on the roads, based on that, we can say that
the main issue is usually about the timing and the
time gap between the two events. STCS will be a
novel approach and the fastest ever while it is using
the 5G technology, which is a quick way of
communication between cars on the roads, that
gives us the minor timing gap between the two
events that can highly minimize the number of the
 Alsarhan et al., A Proposed Solution for a Safety Traffic Control System Using IoT (STCS), ICAENS 2021, Konya, Turkey
road crashes more than any other proposed system
that uses the old ways of communication.
II. RELATED WORK
The survey that was described in [1] discussed the
future Internet of things revolution, the main idea of
the IoT is to make a connection between all the
smart objects in the real world, like the mobile
devices, cars, even refrigerators, washing machines,
Dishwashers, or lighting units. Which They are able
to be addressed with a unique schema to interact
between each other’s in the future. The STCS
system basically aims to make the old cars usable in
revolution of the IoT to become more efficient in the
future not only the junk of steel.
Sánchez et al. in [2] presented a vehicle-to-vehicle
(V2V) 5G communications that were the backbone
of their work. Furthermore, they explained the idea
of V2V 5G data exchange where they used V2V
radio communication to avoid the mobile network
latency problem. The speed of future 5G technology
and the requirements of the 5G technology were
described in their work. However, it still millimeter
wave radio channel using directional antennas at 38
GHz and 60 GHz frequency bands. The main
advantage of the STCS is the ability to collect data
not only from one vehicle in front of you but also
collect data from the surrounding vehicles in the
next 1 km or the next 10 cars ahead and analyze the
data to make the right decision at the right time to
prevent any accident that can happen.
Riddiford et.al. [4] introduces a patent called
Brake by Wire System that can control the force of
the braking power based on some given details from
a number of sensors in the car, it can be used in the
proposed system to force the car to stop in a
necessary situation and prevent car accidents, by
connecting the mobile device through USB
intermediate capable to interact with the car ECU.
Biswas et al. in [5], They presented a vehicle-to-
vehicle wireless communication with an overview
of the highway cooperative collision avoidance
(CCA) to emerging vehicular safety application
using the IEEE and ASTM adopted Dedicated
Short-Range Communication (DSRC) standard.
They discussed an Intelligent Transportation
System (ITS) application using wireless
communication technology. The ITS was
application primarily revolves about potentially
reducing the chain collisions by reducing the gap in
time between the emergency event and the time at
which the drivers behind are informed. Technically,
ITS was applied by collecting the propagated
information among vehicles using wireless
communication which is at the year of 2006, it was
a novel idea in comparison with the behavior by the
traditional way of taking an action by the driver
without using any technology. But unfortunately,
the communication service at that time was not fast
enough, like nowadays to keep applying such
communication way between vehicles, especially
with the newly released communications such as the
5G technology.
The proposed STCS uses the ECU to collect data
from the car and control the car's behavior on the
road. Another importance for this unit in the STCS
is to allow the mobile device to interact with the
brake by wire system.
III. METHODOLOGY
A. Vehicle Internal Connection
This section will describe how to make the car
smart to interact with its internal parts. If equipped
with Brake & Steer by a wire system to take
commands from the web server. Figure 1 describes
the internal sub-parts to understand the complexity
of this process.
Fig. 1 Vehicle Internal Connection.
1) Mobile Device
The mobile device is going to be the smart part of
the vehicle and the point of interaction between the
car and the web server, the mobile device will use
an application to do this job, and by using the GPS
the vehicle location will be detected and keep
tracking of the vehicle position in real time, the
mobile device also responsible to identify the
vehicle to the web service and transfer the data
between them.
2) USB Intermediate
a) Hardware Intermediate
It is a device that is responsible for ensure the
physical connection between the mobile device and
the vehicle, from the vehicle perspective it is a
hardware that is connected directly to the ECU, and
 Alsarhan et al., A Proposed Solution for a Safety Traffic Control System Using IoT (STCS), ICAENS 2021, Konya, Turkey
on the other hand, from the mobile device
perspective it is a USB device gadget, that will
interact with the application through the USB
interface.
b) Software Framework
The software framework is part of this process that
is responsible for ensure the harmony between the
mobile device and the USB Intermediate, because
the USB Intermediate is running on the ECU level,
and the high-level languages cannot work with this
level [6] so the Arduino will be used.
3) Controller Area Network Bus (CAN Bus)
CAN bus can be considered as the internal
connection or the network of the vehicle [7], CAN
bus uses hexadecimal encoded messages to transmit
data between the ECUs and the internal vehicle
components[8]. The USB Intermediate should be
able to get all the transmitted data from the CAN
bus.
4) Electronic Control Unit (ECU)
The ECU is simply defined as the vehicle
computer or computers that are responsible for
managing the activities in the vehicle and collect
data from the sensors in the vehicle and analyze it to
tune the performance of the car and the engine [3].
One of the most important systems that is managed
by the ECU is the braking system. The brake by wire
system is the responsible part of the system to
manage the braking power between the four wheels
and prevent any wheel from locking using the
antilock braking system (ABS) and other driving
assistant’s systems [9]. In this study, we will make
the brake by wire system stop the vehicle when
needed or just reduce the speed to no danger speed.
B. Vehicle External Connection
This phase concentrates on the vehicle server
connection using the 5G communication, the
connection will start when the mobile device sends
the identity of the vehicle to the web service with
the initial information of the vehicle, such as the
heading, speed, GPS position and other information
about the vehicle status. The web service will collect
the data from all vehicles in the same area to analyze
this data and make the right decision for each
vehicle in that area to stop or to slow down based on
the information-gathering process. The high speed
of the 5G will allow this process to be performed in
about 20ms [2], and this is more than enough to
prevent any accident. Figure 2 shows the details.
Fig 2: Vehicle External Connection.
C. Reaction Distance
The distance that is required to take the action of
braking, if the driver fails to start braking on this
distance, then the braking distance will be not
enough for the vehicle to stop even after hitting the
brakes [10][11]. The formula of reaction distance is
shown in Equation 1 Where D: reaction distance in
meters, s: speed in km/h, r: reaction time in seconds,
3.6: fixed figure for converting km/h to m/s.
(s∗r)
D= (1)
3.6
D. Braking Distance
It is the distance required to stand the vehicle from
starting the brake process [10][11]. This distance
will be used to determine how long is the distance
to be able to break from the moment it hits the
brakes or initiating the brake using the wire system.
Braking distance is shown in Equation 2 in
conditions of good tires and good brakes Where d:
braking distance in meters, s: speed in km/h, f:
coefficient of friction, approx. 0.8 on dry asphalt
and 0.1 on ice, 250: fixed figure which is always
used.
𝑠2
𝑑 = (250∗𝑓) (2)
5) E. Stopping Distance
The stopping distance is the summation of the
reaction distance and the braking distance, which
means it is the total distance required to stop the
vehicle or to avoid the collisions [8]. Figure 3 shows
the difference between the reaction, braking, and
stopping distance. The system will keep a safe
distance between vehicles (stopping distance) since
the brake by wire system will be forced to slow the
vehicle down to keep the safe distance on high
traffic situations or low 5G coverage conditions.
However, if the vehicle is not equipped with the
brake by wire system, the driver will be notified
 Alsarhan et al., A Proposed Solution for a Safety Traffic Control System Using IoT (STCS), ICAENS 2021, Konya, Turkey

only with the safe distance between his vehicle and message (“Collision may occur”), but what if the
the vehicle in front to avoid collisions. driver was able to avoid the collision? Then the
system will continue to read the coming data and
scan the current speed if equals to zero and the
current location is not changing system will make
sure that there is a collision occurred and will notify
the system with the message (“Collision occurred”).
The system will send an alert to all surrounding
vehicles.
Fig 3: Stopping Distance.
F. System Overview
The data that has been collected from the vehicle's
sensors goes straight to the ECU. The mobile device
will be able to read the data from the ECU through
the USB interface which is directly connected to the
CAN bus. Then the mobile will send the data into
the web server to be processed in order to send alerts
to the surrounding vehicles through a fast 5G
network [2] [5] Figure 4 describes the concept of
STCS system.

Fig 5: STCS Flow Chart.

IV. EXPERIMENTS
Fig 4: STCS Connections Overview.
An Android mobile application was built with
At the same time, the web server will be receiving limited functionalities to get the location and speed
data from other connected vehicles and will manage of each vehicle since we did not build the USB
traffic by sending signals to the vehicles to avoid interface to read data from the vehicle yet.
any upcoming accidents based on the gathered
information. The web service will read live data
from vehicles around the system, then the system
will process the data from each vehicle and send
notifications to each vehicle based on the reaction
distance and the braking distance for each vehicle.
The flow chart in Figure 5 shows that.

The process will start by receiving data from

connected mobile devices over the system, the data
will be included in the current location and speed of
the vehicle. The second step is to calculate the
reaction distance for the vehicle and update the
mobile device with the data and any notification
message if needed based on if the reaction distance
is less or equal to the current vehicle distance. If the
condition is True, then the system will notify the
vehicle with the stopping distance and then the
process will continue to update the readings every
0.5 seconds. But if the condition result was False
then the system will detect that there is a collision
that could happen and will notify the system with the
Fig 6: STCS Mobile Application.
So, the basic information about the vehicle is the
current location based on each vehicle, and the
speed also can be determined from the mobile
application, and we have added a manual button to
send data about the braking since we do not have
access to the CAN bus yet to read the braking data
directly from the vehicle. Figure 6 shows the basic
 Alsarhan et al., A Proposed Solution for a Safety Traffic Control System Using IoT (STCS), ICAENS 2021, Konya, Turkey

and testing readings from the application which “Millimeter wave radio channel characterization for 5G
have also been sent to the server database to be vehicle-to-vehicle communications,” Measurement,
vol. 95, pp. 223–229, 2017.
processed. The processing of the data on the server
also was basic and limited to finding the reaction, [3] M. Kaiser, “Electronic control unit (ECU),” in
braking, and stopping distance. The data on the Gasoline Engine Management, Springer, 2015, pp.
254–259.
server is sorted, as shown in Table 1.
[4] B. P. Riddiford, J. B. Hageman, D. E. Schenk, and S. S.
Shaw, “Brake by wire system with separate controllers
Table 1 The data on the server
and both position and force input sensors.” Google
Patents, May 21, 2002.
longitude

Reaction

Stopping
Distance
Latitude

Braking

In Front

Braking
Speed
ID

1 31.959813 35.863566 34.51 35.83
2 31.959841 35.864026 - 59.48
Every vehicle should have its own ID to identify
the vehicle, and also the current location of the
vehicle will be determined using the Latitude &
Longitude. The distance, reaction distance, braking
distance, stopping distance will be determined only
for the vehicle in the back, which means that the
vehicle with the 0 value for the in-front feature. In-
front feature refers to whether the car is followed by
an-other car or not, and during testing, we only had
two vehicles only, so we added the values for this
feature manually. The braking feature tells us if the
driver is hitting the brake pedal or not manually
from the mobile application.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a new solution was proposed to
enhance safety on the roads. Which is the STCS
system that uses the 5G service, with a web service
between the vehicle-to-vehicle communication to
do the processing through it, and to make an overall
road situation through the web service, also STCS
can be applied on the old and the new vehicles,
which makes it an entirely feasible solution in the
future. Implementing the STCS system as what was
officially designed until this moment is not easy to
be done entirely, but we are on the way to finish it.
Once the 5G service is officially released in the
world, we will be able to use it. However, as a new
idea, it is a novel way to take safety to an upper level
on the roads to help prevent road collisions.
D
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