Toward Wi-Fi-Enabled Real-Time Communication for Proactive Safety Systems in Highway Work Zones: A Case Study

Given the fatal risks that highway workers encounter, securing the safety of highway work zones is one of the most pressing issues in the highway maintenance and operation community. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT) suggest that departing from current reactive safety systems to predictive and sophisticated solutions is feasible. Real-time communication among the utilized agents plays a crucial role in the success of such systems. Therefore, in this paper, researchers investigate the challenges and requirements of establishing a local IoT system in highway work zones. They devised a case study to design a network among multiple endpoints and measured the latency of real-time communication among the utilized devices based on different network architectures. Their results indicate that in the most crowded network, 4 endpoints were able to wirelessly communicate with an average latency of 10 milliseconds at farthest distance. They also identified distance, the number of endpoints, and heavy moving objects as the potential barriers impacting network performance. Overall, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge by providing preliminary insights toward utilizing IoT networks in the context of highway work zones.