Calculating the speed of vehicles using Wireless Sensor Networks

Speed measurement is an important issue for some types of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), especially for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). However, calculating this value is error-prone and costly. This report intends to demonstrate the calculation of speed of an object without the use of any additional devices or sensor boards, only using Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) for localization of the vehicles and time calculation using synchronization. We implemented these methods in actual IRIS motes, and tested them. The results show that, while not perfectly accurate, our method proved to be reliable and close to the real speed. In addition, the results do not have any linear correlation in divergence of real speed and calculated speed, which means the system avoids systematic errors.