[en] Recent advances in the field of intelligent transportation systems have focused on the use of wireless networks to link vehicles and road infrastructure. Applications that might result from such networks range from the adaptive management of traffic lights to the detection of traffic jams and accidents. Whatever the case may be, it seems important to explore the possibilities and limitations of such networks, which the literature often portrays in a somewhat idealistic way (e.g. no packet loss, fully connected sensors, etc.). In this paper, we study the deployment of wireless sensor networks at intersections in some of the world's major cities and characterize their topologies. Using a propagation model that corresponds to a 2.4GHz IEEE 802.15.4 network interface, we focus our study on the global connectivity of graphs resulting from different networks. By deploying this type of network over 52 city and region maps extracted from OpenStreetMap, we show that cities can reasonably be classified into three network structure categories of low connectivity (i.e. a high number of connected components) and that it should be feasible to improve the networks by adding sensors. All the tools and the complete dataset are freely available online.
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