Clustering intelligent transportation sensors using public transportation

Advanced transportation sensors use a wireless medium to communicate and use data fusion techniques to provide complete information. Large-scale use of intelligent transportation sensors can lead to data bottlenecks in an ad-hoc wireless sensor network, which needs to be reliable and should provide a framework to sensors that constantly join and leave the network. A possible solution is to use public transportation vehicles as data fusion nodes or cluster heads. This paper presents a mathematical programming approach to use public transportation vehicles as cluster heads. The mathematical programming solution seeks to maximize benefit achieved by covering both mobile and stationary sensors, while considering cost/penalty associated with changing cluster head locations. A simulation is developed to capture realistic considerations of a transportation network. This simulation is used to validate the solution provided by the mathematical model.