Development of a Virtual Vehicle Identification for Tracking Hit-and-Run Vehicle

In general, the vehicle registration plate number and the witness are essential clues for police investigating hit-and-run accidents. Without these clues, it will be difficult for police to trace the suspect and lead to a closed case even though a fatal victim is involved. In this work, the virtual vehicle identification tracking system is developed by using wireless communication interfaces to transfer useful data for road accidents and traffic surveillance. This system uses vehicle access points and employs Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) to assist the vehicle identity tracking system. The IoT development board scans all the vehicle Wi-Fi access points within the beacon frames. With the characteristics of different positions of signal strength and the distance of station to access point, it is difficult to accurately determine the offender's vehicle identity. Hence, this paper proposes a hybrid tracking method to combine pre-accident and post-accident tracking methods to track vehicle identity. Moreover, this paper shows unique Wi-Fi access point identities such as Service Set Identifier (SSID) and Media Access Control (MAC) addresses can be used as virtual vehicle identities for vehicle tracking and traffic surveillance systems. Overall, the result shows this system can track the suspect vehicle's identity with positive detection. The maximum distance for the system to track vehicle access point signal can be up to 45 meters and is workable above 50 km/h of driving speed.