Keynote Talk

NOTICE – An Architecture for

Traffic Incident Detection
Stephan Olariu
Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA, USA
olariu@cs.odu.edu

Abstract
Road and traffic safety can be improved if the drivers have the ability to see further down the road and
can be informed of relevant traffic events, including collisions and slow-downs. The recently proposed
VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc Networks) are expected to enable both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and
vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications. Virtually all the papers published in the literature assume
that V2V communications will rely on a strong roadside infrastructure. Unfortunately, the roadside
infrastructure, is very likely to be the target of theft, vandalism and other similar activities that will
jeopardize their intended functionality. Worse yet, one can easily contemplate a scenario where the
roadside infrastructure may be hacked and injected with malicious code, rendering it not only useless
but, downright dangerous.
However, all the VANET systems proposed thus far are afflicted with serious security and privacy
problems. Indeed, the way current systems are set up, the driver of a car that participates in the traffic
will not be able to preserve their privacy and may be subject to impersonation or Sybil attacks. The
problem stems from the fact that V2V communication can be traced back to an individual car. Even if
several pseudonyms are used, detecting the true identity of the driver and, therefore, invading their
privacy appears to be unavoidable.
In a sharp departure from the common wisdom we propose to look at vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and
vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications from a different perspective. Instead of relying on the
roadside infrastructure that is vulnerable to attacks, we propose to embed in the asphalt covering the
surface of the roads sensor belts. Each belt consists of a collection of pressure sensors, optionally
equipped with piezo-electric elements. The belts can detect and interact with passing cars.
In this keynote address we discuss in detail NOTICE and show that it can be easily extended to cover
many problems of interest in infotainment and peer-to-peer content delivery. One important application
of NOTICE is with planned evaluations when optimal use must be made of available transportation
resource.

Categories & Subject Descriptors: C.2.1 COMPUTER COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

– Network Architecture and Design

General Terms: Measurement, Performance, Design.

Bio
Professor Stephan Olariu is a full professor in Computer Science at Old Dominion University, Norfolk,
Virginia. He is a world-renowned technologist in the areas of parallel and distributed systems, parallel and
distributed architectures and networks. He was invited and visited more than 120 universities and research
institutes around the world lecturing on topics ranging from wireless networks and mobile computing, to
biology-inspired algorithms and applications, to telemedicine, to wireless location systems, and security.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

MSWiM’09, October 26–29, 2009, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
ACM 978-1-60558-616-8/09/10.