Design of a Wireless Sensor Network to Detect Car Accidents on Highways

In Latin America, the number of car accidents are alarming figures every year. Ecuador is one of the countries that leads the statistics. This paper presents an engineering design proposal to detect a car accident on roads or highways with the aim to reduce deaths caused by these events and to improve the response time of the corresponding emergency entities. This work analyzes a particular scenario and does not pretend to compare the performance of our proposal with prior related works. Our solution consists of several components: a wireless sensor network with elements based on open source tools (such as Arduino nano microcontroller), distance sensors (HC-SR04) and accelerometer sensor (MMA7361), a Raspberry PI 3 model B embedded system and the deployment of a Zigbee network. The system is connected by means of a wireless local area network (WLAN) to a database server and a web application. Sensors response (accelerometer and proximity) in a frontal vehicle collision was proven by implementing a prototype, in order to be tested in a real scenario. The numerical results demonstrate that the response time between the vehicle and the concentrator affects (either increasing or reducing) the total communication time between the vehicle and the web server.