Design of a low-power road monitoring system for smart cities based on Wireless Sensor Network

As an important part of smart city, smart road monitoring collects information by modern technologies of electronic information, e.g., the Internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and wireless sensor network (WSN), and realizes all-round control of the whole process of traffic management, transportation, and public travel. However, the large and complex network of the system leads to several problems: the system consumes a huge amount of energy; the subsystems cannot exchange information smoothly; it is difficult to update or optimize the system. To solve these problems, this paper designs a WSN-based low-power monitoring system for smart city roads. Specifically, the functional requirements of the road monitoring system for smart city were fully analyzed, and the architecture of the system was designed in functional dimensions of networked sharing platform, monitoring system data flows, and cloud storage database. After that, the authors analyzed the energy consumption of WSN, quantified the topological parameters, and realized the low-power design based on the energy-saving technique of data compression and sleep/wake-up. The proposed energy-saving strategy was proved effective through experiments.