The risk of having an accident in a car could soon be drastically cut thanks to a new approach to wireless network systems similar to systems used in mobile phone technology. Researchers say that new embedded sensor network systems in the road systems could put up information on individual cars and act on this automatically, over-riding the driver control, to avoid accidents.

Sensor networks instead take information from several individual nodes - potentially thousands of them in different locations - in real time, and can act on it accordingly.

This means that during a journey, vehicles could monitor each other's speed and position - and therefore dramatically cut the risk of accidents.

"I think that we may, in the future, go beyond just communication to using the network to interact with the environment," Professor PR Kumar of the Convergence Lab at the University of Illinois told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme.

"For example, cars on a highway may talk to each other and find out each others' speeds. So a sensor in that context could just be the speedometer on a car, which could talk to surrounding cars. These cars could then co-operate with each other to avoid accidents and so on."

Embedded sensor networks represent a shift away from computers communicating purely over a network, to sensors that communicate with each other. And the next stage is an 'actuator network', where computers are able to act on the information they receive from the sensors. This could mean, for example, reducing speed in advance if slower traffic conditions are detected.

Professor Kumar said: "Interaction is a two-way process, so I don't just want to know what speed it is; I want to change the speed."

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