Third International Symposium on Intelligent Information Technology and Security Informatics

ZigBee-based Vehicle Access Control System

Rong Zhou, Chunyue Zhao, Lili Fu, Ao Chen and Meiqian Ye

College of Information & Electronic Engineering
Zhejiang Gongshang University
Hangzhou, China
Email: yemeiqian@pop.zjgsu.edu.cn

Abstract—Vehicle access control system is an important
sub-system of the intelligentized residence section. Today, in a
growing emphasis on personal and property safety, the control
of vehicles’ access authorization and the management of the
vehicles’ access authority, access time and access method via
computer, is safe and convenient.
This paper describes a set of vehicle access control system
based on ZigBee wireless technology. In this system, ZigBee
coordinator and its terminal nodes installed respectively in the
entrance of the district and the vehicles, together form a
ZigBee wireless sensor network. This paper mainly introduces
the overall structure, hardware platform and software design
of this system. The implementation and performance tests of
this system are fairly good.
Keywords—ZigBee; WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks);
CC2430; Vehicle Management
I. INTRODUCTION
With the increasing raise of people's living standards, the
vehicle theft in community, as well as the total amount of
car, has a rapid growth. How to conduct an intelligent
management to the access of internal vehicles efficiently
and effectively suffers more and more attention from
various circles. At present, the most widely approaches used
in vehicle management are:
1) Artificial inquiry identification method: This is the
most simple and convenient way. Its advantage lies in its
flexibility, which simultaneously shows its hidden crises:
Dominated by personal factors; waste of labor and difficulty
of information communication.
2) Image recognition method: It is not new to all of us.
Though it has reduced the labor force, it also has many
disadvantages, such as large investment, low recognition
rate and susceptibility to weather.
3) Contact IC Card Management: The contact IC
(Integrated Circuit) card, packaging a IC chip in a standard
PVC (polyvinyl chloride) card, reads and writes data relying
on direct contact between the bare chip and reader card
connector. It inherits the advantages of image recognition
method, and its recognition rate is much higher. However,
its own shortcomings become insurmountable obstacles to
its further development, such as contact wear, difficult to
maintain, large investments in infrastructure facilities.
In allusion to the shortcomings of these current vehicle
management systems, this issue puts forward that the
vehicle access control should be achieved with the usage of
ZigBee wireless sensor networks. ZigBee based on IEEE
802.15.4, is an emerging short-range, low-speed, low-power
wireless networking technology. ZigBee wireless
networking technology is mainly used for short-range
wireless connectivity. Features of it include the following
sections:
1) Low data transmission rate: Only 10kb/s~250kb/s,
focusing on low-transmission applications.
2) Low power consumption: In the low-power standby
mode, two ordinary 5 batteries can be used more than 6
months. This is also the unique advantage which ZigBee’s
proponents have been proud of.
3) Low cost: The cost is greatly reduced because of its
low data transmission rate and simple protocol.
4) Large capacity of the network: Each ZigBee network
can at most support 255 devices, which means each ZigBee
device can connect with another 254 devices.
Therefore, it is possible to apply ZigBee technology to
vehicle access control system, so that the whole
management system is composed to be a ZigBee wireless
sensor network, which can achieve wireless transmission
and management of vehicle information. It is of great
practical significance to the intelligent management of
vehicles.
II. SYSTEM BUILDING OVERVIEW
The implementation of this Vehicle Access Control
Wireless System is based on ZigBee technology. According
to its applications, its network topology uses the star-shaped
wireless network, which consists of one monitoring center
and a number of terminal equipments. Fig. 1 shows the
network structure of the system.
Figure 1. star network topology
Monitoring center is composed by a computer and a
network coordinator. The network coordinator is a special
full-function device (FFD), which can realizes a set number

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DOI 10.1109/IITSI.2010.50

Authorized licensed use limited to: Thangavelu Group of Institutions. Downloaded on June 22,2010 at 09:12:55 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
of ZigBee services. It is responsible for communication with
its child nodes, data collection and dissemination of control
information. In this system, the network coordinator is
installed in the duty room. It establishes and manages the
network, receives the data and displays them on the LCD
(liquid crystal display). Meanwhile, the coordinator sends
the data into the PC (Personal Computer) through RS-232
serial cable. PC is responsible for storage and further
processing of the data. The terminal device may be either
FFD or Simplifies device RFD(Reduced Function Device).
RFD is the simplest ZigBee node, only implementing a
minimum of ZigBee services. RFD node in this system has
been installed in each vehicle, and it’s responsible for
reading, processing and sending the vehicle’s information.
The overall architecture of this system is shown in Fig. 2.
Figure 2. System frame diagram
When the RFD node hasn’t entered into the
communication range, that is it hasn’t yet joined into the
network, the coordinator will not receive its information.
Once the RFD node has entered into the communication
range, it will automatically join into the network. And the
coordinator will be able to receive messages sent by this
node, followed by a corresponding set of processes and
operations.
III. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
A. Hardware platform
The system uses C51RF-3-ZDS series ZigBee/802.15.4
wireless MCU (Microprogrammed Control Unit)
development system. The hardware platform includes:
C51RF-3-ZDS emulator, wireless 2.4GHz High Frequency
Module, backplanes with LCD expansion or ZigBee
wireless sensor and so on.
The ZigBee wireless vehicle management system
formed with C51RF-3-ZDS is as shown in Fig. 3.
Figure 3. C51RF-3-ZDS formed ZigBee Wireless Vehicle Management
System
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In this system, we use the backplane with LCD
expansion as the network coordinator, and the backplanes
with ZigBee wireless sensor as vehicle wireless terminals.
Both Coordinator and terminals have two LED (Light
Emitting Diode) lights on their backplanes, in order to
display the network traffic status visually. Figure above only
draws two terminal nodes, in fact, ZigBee network can
dynamically add more nodes. Compared with the traditional
vehicle access control system, ZigBee wireless
network-based Vehicle Management System has a greater
network capacity, it can manage more wireless terminal
nodes. It can also monitor vehicles, equals to a simple
positioning system.
B. System software design
The system software, designed in a modular modus, is
comprised of the hardware layer, software layer and
application layer. The hardware layer, with a core of
CC2430 internally owning an 8051 core and a RF (radio
frequency) transceiver, completes the collection of data and
delivery of commands. Software layer transplants the
Z-stack to achieve the data processing and transmission.
Application layer runs programs written by ourselves,
which, in this system, is mainly responsible for reading and
sending vehicle information. The design structure is shown
in Fig. 4.
Figure 4. System design structure
The MAC (Media Access Control) layer and physical
layer protocols of Z-stack are IEEE802.15.4 protocol
standards, and need not to change; Network layer and
security layer is formulated by the ZigBee Alliance,
provided in the form of library. Thus, the development of
the entire system is mainly about the procedures’
implementation on application layer. Its core is the Software
Design of coordinator and the terminals, as well as the
procedures’ implementation of several key techniques and
algorithms.
1) Software Design of Coordinator:
After power, coordinator will first initialize the hardware
and software on the board, such as the radio part of the
CC2420, the internal CPU (Central Processing Unit) and so
on. Then, the coordinator will set up a network: coordinator
attempts to establish a new network by scanning an empty
channel, then waits for new device nodes to join its network
and allocates addresses to them. If there is no entrant, the
coordinator will go to handle a variety of pending events.
Coordinator node in this design is mainly used to receive the
data from all terminal nodes. Flowchart of the receive
program is as shown in Fig. 5.

Figure 5. Flowchart of the receive program
After the initialization was finished, the LED lights flash
three times and then are all closed, turning into the
wait-to-receive state. The program is designed to listen to
multiple channels circularly. If receiving signal from a
certain transmitter module, the corresponding LED light
flashes once. Meanwhile, the received data will be displayed
on the LCD, and uploaded to the monitoring host in order to
facilitate data analysis and preservation. Then, the program
will skip to the next channel to continue listening.
2) Software Design of Terminal node:
Terminal’s main function is to send the information on
its vehicle to the coordinator circularly. Flowchart of the
send program is as shown in Fig. 6.
Figure 6. Flowchart of the send program
After power, the terminal device will first initialize the
hardware and software, that is the RF part of the C2420 and
the internal CPU. Terminal device nodes need to find
whether there is already a network that can join. Once the
terminal device detects the existence of a coordinator on a
particular channel, it will launch notification either
associated with or isolated, in order to join or re-join the
network.
After joining the network successfully, the LED lights
on the module flash three times together, then flash
circularly, sending data. After the completion of
initialization, in order to correspond to the receiving
channel, the node’s sending channel is re-set according to its
ID (Identity) number, so that different nodes possess their
sole channels respectively.
3) Program implementation of the key techniques and
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algorithms:
Wireless links use the same transmission medium - the
air to transmit the radio signal. In order to achieve
multi-point inter-communication within the same area, how
to prevent the collision between the data packets
transmitting in the air must be considered, so that reliable
wireless transmission paths can be established. In this
system, some solutions, such as FDMA (Frequence Division
Multiple Access), CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple
Access with Collision Avoidance) and so on, are used to
solve corresponding issues, as their commonly usage in
wireless communication.
a) FDMA program implementation:
In the program, change of channel is necessary. Setting
the 2.4GHz frequency band, the channel can be changed
with the change of the CHANNR value in register. In
programming, different transmitting modules are fixed
mandatorily in different channels. Take a simple system as
an example, which is composed of two transmit module
TX1 and TX2, a receiver module RX.
Module TX1 and TX2 send data packets to the RX
module at the same time. (as they send in different
sub-channels, packet collision will not occur in the air,
neither will appear packet transmission errors.) While, the
RX module constantly scans the different sub-channels to
monitor whether there is a qualified data packet. If any, it
will automatically receive it. So it achieves point (module
RX) to multi-point (module TX1 and module TX2) reliable
wireless data communication.
b) CSMA/CA program implementation:
ZigBee adopts CSMA/CA algorithm. CSMA/CA
protocol provides that: When one of the sites tends to send a
message, it should first monitor the channel to check
whether the idle period is longer than a certain frame
interval. If so, sent immediately, otherwise don’t send and
continue monitoring. CSMA/CA communication mode
closely links the division of the time domain with the frame
format, ensures that only one site is sending at a time, and
achieves centralized control of network systems.
IV. SYSTEM TEST AND RESULTS
C51RF-3-ZDS hardware development platform is used
to demonstrate this system. C51RF-3-ZDS emulator has all
C51 source level debugging functions, such as high-speed
code download, on-line DEBUG, hardware breakpoints,
single step, variable observation, registers observation, and
so on. The integrated development environment used is IAR
Embedded Workbench IDE.
In Demonstration, a LCD expansion board plus a ZigBee
module CC2430 constitutes the coordinator (RX); Two
ZigBee wireless sensor plates and two ZigBee Modules
CC2430 constitute two terminal nodes (TX1\TX2).
Demonstrate the following steps:
1) Build the hardware platform: Plug the CC2430's
ZigBee module into the expansion board, connect the
ZigBee module antenna, and install the battery. Then
connect C51RF-3-ZDS emulator with ZigBee module
through artificialline, and with computer through the USB
interface.
2) Compile, download and debug procedures with the
IAR software integrated development environment: Open the
project file through the IAR, compile and modify related
procedures in the application layer according to design
requirements. It is noteworthy that, the channels of TX1 and
TX2 are defined NO_1_FREQUENCY 2480000 and
NO_2_FREQUENCY 2420000 with the macro. Download
the modified receive code to the RX module, and 2 send
codes to the TX1, TX2 modules respectively. Debug after
the download is complete.
3) Run the program: When running programs in the RX
module, after pressing the RESET button, the red and
yellow LED lights flash three times together, meanwhile
LCD screen displays the open interface (wireless dragon
icon) and words “Receive”. Then both lights are closed,
waiting to receive data. When running programs in the
TX1\TX2 module, the two lights, after three times
simultaneous flash, flash alternately and circularly, and send
data. If the RX module receives data from TX1, the red light
flashes; If TX2, yellow light flashes. At the same time, on
the LCD of RX module displayes the specific data received.
The sent data can be modified in the program. It can be
arbitrary strings consisting of no more than 48 letters,
numbers, or punctuations.
4) Analyze the data frame: With C51RF-6-type network
analyzer, the data transmitting through the air in the process
of communication can be seen, as shown in Fig. 7.
Figure 7. Date from TX1\TX2
In the figure above, the number 5 packet is from TX1,
number 6 is from TX2. The data situation of each frame in
each layer is quite clear. Between these two packets, only
the payloads of the MAC-layer are different, and the rest is
the same.
In C51RF-3-ZDS hardware development platform, this
vehicle management system can debug successfully. We
also test the performance of this system, mainly includ
communication distance testing and reliability testing. Test
results show that in the absence of relay router, this system
can form a Point-to-Multipoin star-type network within a
radius of 100m, increasing TX power can increase the
communication distance. If the network is stable,
transmitting node can sends 1000 consecutive packets in
30m transmission distance successfully, with the packet loss
rate 0.
Thus, the communication distance of ZigBee network
meets the needs of most Vehicle Access Control System,
and the network has high reliability. Use ZigBee wireless
network technology to design Wireless Vehicle
Management System is feasible. Of course, this design still
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has many issues that urgently to await improvement.
This design choses Z-Stack to achieve a complex
network, which can support for many nodes theoretically.
But in fact, when the system is too large, its transmission
delay will be too long, leading to reduced efficiency of the
system. Therefore, in future work, the development of
low-level needs further optimization, based on the ZigBee
protocol stack. So that, a large-scale, strong functions
Wireless Vehicle Management System can be formed. In
addition, if improvement in energy-saving and flexibility is
expected, terminal nodes can be designed to work in sleep
mode before accessing to communication zone. When
entering into the communication zone, they will be waked
up by the coordinator and start sending data. The power
consumption can be largely reduced in this way. It would be
very worthy of further exploration and experimentation.
V. CONCLUSION
This design utilizes ZigBee WSN technology to realize
the wireless management and dispatch system of vehicle
access. At the same time, In demonstration and testing, the
system has achieved good test results, in the usage of
C51RF-3-ZDS hardware development platform.
This system has realized the following functions: when a
vehicle assess to the entrance, the transmitter installed in the
car sends related information, through the radio transmitter
module in CC2430 chip, to the receiver which is set in the
access control office. After successfully received the
vehicle’s information, the receiver passes the data to
microcontroller to decode them. The control system will
receive this information and store it in the database. The
manager can query all the information in database, including
license plate number, driver number and so on.
Though, there are a number of things need improving,
this system has been basically completed, and has passed the
test with a quite satisfactory results.
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