Microscopic Congestion Detection Protocol in VANETs

Abstract

Effective transportation status surveillance imposes critical challenges for the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) design. In this paper, the microscopic congestion detection protocol (MCDP) is proposed to make the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication capable of monitoring vehicle density and identifying traffic jam. By introducing transportation control domain in the existing network protocol header, each vehicle can count its neighbors and estimate the time spacing among vehicles. MCDP provides an infrastructure-less solution to the estimate of vehicle density, flow, and average velocity in a microscopically manner. Moreover, the safety speed limit is introduced to make each vehicle calculate its time to cover the intervehicle distance, such that every vehicle is able to assess the transportation congestion by comparing with some predefined safety time threshold. Monte Carlo simulations of the MCDP over four typical Chinese highways are presented to compare the MCDP scheme with the existing GreenShield congestion detection scheme. In addition, real road traces generated by SUMO over NS2 are utilized to show the achieved performance in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery rate (PDR) in comparison to DSR and AOMDV in IEEE 802.11p and IEEE 802.11ac scenarios. On the basis of all the results, we conclude that MCDP is an inexpensive transport congestion detection technique for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs).

A Microscopic Platoon Stability Model Using Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

“…Over the past few years, VANET-based platoons have been extensively studied. Most of the studies related to traffic dynamic control and performance optimization [10][11][12][13][14][15]. The authors in [10,11] proposed two schemes, namely microscopic congestion detection protocol (MCDP) and infrastructure-based vehicular congestion detection (IVCD), for dynamic traffic congestion detection and avoidance.…”

“…Most of the studies related to traffic dynamic control and performance optimization [10][11][12][13][14][15]. The authors in [10,11] proposed two schemes, namely microscopic congestion detection protocol (MCDP) and infrastructure-based vehicular congestion detection (IVCD), for dynamic traffic congestion detection and avoidance. The first scheme MCDP [10], estimates the traffic density from vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and avoids it by helping the drivers to select an appropriate speed.…”

“…The authors in [10,11] proposed two schemes, namely microscopic congestion detection protocol (MCDP) and infrastructure-based vehicular congestion detection (IVCD), for dynamic traffic congestion detection and avoidance. The first scheme MCDP [10], estimates the traffic density from vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and avoids it by helping the drivers to select an appropriate speed. In contrast, IVCD [11] estimates the traffic congestion from the base station using vehicleto-infrastructure (V2I) communications.…”

“…In the same context, Zahid and Anis proposed a dynamic traffic monitoring protocol called SmartFlow [14] for congestion detection and assessing the drivers to avoid long delays on traffic signals. In this paper, in the light of the work done in [10][11][12][13][14][15], we adopt the dynamic traffic management features and applied to the VANET-based dynamic platoon management. It is challenging to maintain the time headway and inter-vehicle spacing for a dynamic platoon in the cases of platoon merging, splitting, and speed-change [16].…”

“…Several significant projects have proposed the inter-platoon coordination model [20][21][22][23]. Based on the existing platoon works [20][21][22][23] and the dynamic traffic management [10][11][12][13][14][15], devising a dynamic platoon management scheme to suit a dynamic traffic nature effectively is imperative. Many research efforts focused on maintaining platoon stability and providing valuable driving guidance.…”