Traffic congestion prediction using deep reinforcement learning in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETS)

Abstract

In recent years, a new wireless network called vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), has become a popular research topic. VANET allows communication among vehicles and with roadside units by providing information to each other, such as vehicle velocity, location and direction. In general, when many vehicles likely to use the common route to proceed to the same destination, it can lead to a congested route that should be avoided. It may be better if vehicles are able to predict accurately the traffic congestion and then avoid it. Therefore, in this work, the deep reinforcement learning in VANET to enhance the ability to predict traffic congestion on the roads is proposed. Furthermore, different types of neural networks namely Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) are investigated and compared in this deep reinforcement learning model to discover the most effective one. Our proposed method is tested by simulation. The traffic scenarios are created using traffic simulator called Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) before integrating with deep reinforcement learning model. The simulation procedures, as well as the programming used, are described in detail. The performance of our proposed method is evaluated using two metrics; the average travelling time delay and average waiting time delay of vehicles. According to the simulation results, the average travelling time delay and average waiting time delay are gradually improved over the multiple runs, since our proposed method receives feedback from the environment. In addition, the results without and with three different deep learning algorithms, i.e., CNN, MLP and LSTM are compared. It is obvious that the deep reinforcement learning model works effectively when traffic density is neither too high nor too low. In addition, it can be concluded that the effective algorithms for traffic congestion prediction models in descending order are MLP, CNN, and LSTM, respectively.