Cars as traffic sensors
Data about road and traffic conditions can come from radio stations’ helicopters, the Department of Transportation’s roadside sensors, or even, these days, updates from ordinary people with cell phones. But all of these approaches have limitations: Helicopters are costly to deploy and can observe only so many roads at once, and it could take a while for the effects of congestion to spread far enough that a road sensor will detect them.MIT’s CarTel project is investigating how cars themselves could be used as ubiquitous, highly reliable mobile sensors. At the Association for Computing Machinery’s sixth annual Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing on Sept. 16, members of the CarTel team presented a new algorithm that would optimize the dissemination of data through a network of cars with wireless connections. Researchers at Ford are already testing the new algorithm for possible inclusion in future versions of Sync, the in-car communications and...