A meteor burst highway data collection network

This thesis describes the research, development, design and field implementation of a system used for integrating meteor burst technology into a wide area traffic data collection network. Remotely located roadside stations, consisting of traffic monitoring equipment, automatically count and/or classify vehicles that are using the road. Traffic monitoring equipment may be 150 to 300 miles from the nearest urban center. The implementation of a telemetered highway-traffic data collection network provides an efficient means of retrieving data from such remote sites. The system described in this thesis is a solar powered stand alone unit. A real-time clock and a supervisory circuit are incorporated to restart the processor in the event there is an unrecoverable fault. The research, development and design of this system, as well as the criteria involved in the selection of the hardware components, field test results and software algorithms are all presented in this thesis.