Smart city for VANETs using warning messages, traffic statistics and intelligent traffic lights

Abstract

Road safety has become a main issue for governments and car manufacturers in the last twenty years. The development of new vehicular technologies has favoured companies, researchers and institutions to focus their efforts on improving road safety. During the last decades, the evolution of wireless technologies has allowed researchers to design communication systems where vehicles participate in the communication networks. Thus, new types of networks, such as Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), have been created to facilitate communication between vehicles themselves and between vehicles and infrastructure. New concepts where vehicular networks play an important role have appeared the last years, such as smart cities and living labs [1]. Smart cities include intelligent traffic management in which data from the TIC (Traffic Information Centre) infrastructures could be reachable at any point. To test the possibilities of these future cities, living labs (cities in which new designed systems can be tested in real conditions) have been created all over Europe. The goal of our framework is to transmit information about the traffic conditions to help the driver (or the vehicle itself) take adequate decisions. In this work, the development of a warning system composed of Intelligent Traffic Lights (ITLs) that provides information to drivers about traffic density and weather conditions in the streets of a city is proposed and evaluated through simulations. © 2012 IEEE.