A Framework for Electronic Toll Collection in Smart and Connected Communities

The number of vehicles plying the highways keeps growing at a steady pace, leading to high maintenance costs. Toll collection was introduced as a means of raising funds for road maintenance, but the traditional method is usually slow and is prone to cause vehicular traffic congestion on the highways. In this paper, a framework was proposed for Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) in smart and connected communities. The main components of the intelligent system architecture are the wireless sensor nodes, web and mobile applications, and a cloud platform. The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) enables vehicle detection and classification, and establishes a communication link to the back-end of the system. The central database and the web server are hosted in the Cloud while a mobile application is used for electronic transactions, subscription renewal, notification of toll payments, and for tracking toll payment history. In addition, a web dash board is provided for efficient toll administration. The implementation of this system will improve the toll collection efficiency in terms of speed and flexibility. Overall, the contribution of this work extends the frontier of WSNs to the domain of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS).