Zone-based VANET transmission model for traffic signal control

Abstract

The rising number of vehicles and slowly growing transport infrastructure results in congestion issue. Congestion becomes an important research topic for transportation and control sciences. The recent advances in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) allow the traffic control to be tackled as a real-time problem. Recent research works have proven that the VANET technology can improve the traffic control at the intersections by dynamically changing sequences of traffic signals. Transmission of all vehicle positions data in real-time to a traffic lights controller can generate a significant burden on the communication network, thus this paper is focused on the reduction of data transmitted to a control unit by vehicles. The time interval between data transfers from vehicles is defined by zones that are tuned for a given traffic control strategy using the proposed algorithm. The introduced zone-based approach reduces the number of transmitted messages, while maintaining the quality of traffic signal control. The results of experiments firmly show that the proposed method can be successfully used for various state-of-art traffic control algorithms.