An Autonomous Information Collection and Dissemination Model for Large-Scale Urban Road Networks

Autonomous vehicle traffic information systems are an important research direction for next-generation traffic information systems. Existing centralized traffic information systems involve a large initial investment and high operating costs. Furthermore, they suffer from the following problems: the need to communicate large amounts of data, requiring a longer time for road network coverage, unsteady transmission, and the need for an automatic generation and update method for road network congestion information in a large-scale urban road network. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes an intelligent vehicular traffic information system (IVTIS) based on a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). This system employs a local road network and rapid dissemination model (IVTIS-LNFRN) of congestion information based on link nodes for a large-scale urban road network, and it constructs the corresponding system models. We then use traffic simulation software to evaluate the feasibility of the IVTIS. In particular, we investigate the collection, diffusion, and dissemination of congestion information and the automatic generation and update effect of road network congestion information. Furthermore, we analyze the dissemination effect of different traffic inflow volumes, information packet loss rates, and different rates of IVTIS vehicles. The simulation results show that the proposed system has good autonomy and overall performance in terms of the real-time collection and rapid dissemination of congestion information in a large-scale urban road network.