On design of a dynamic carpooling system based on vehicle information shared through the VANET

Because both drivers and passengers may have different time constraints and preferences for carpooling, it is hard to manually find the best carpooling match, i.e., the lowest fuel-cost route, between them in the traditional carpooling web site. With the help of real-time traffic information exchanged among nearby vehicles through the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), this paper proposes the dynamic Carpooling System with real-time Vehicular Information (CSVI) system architecture, algorithms and message flows to calculate the route with the lowest fuel cost, according to dynamic route planning results of the VBA* algorithm that we previously proposed. These algorithms significantly reduce the time complexity under a huge number of possible carpooling combinations. Finally, simulation results exhibit excellent performance results of this VANET-based carpooling system over traditional ones, with the help of VBA* and proposed CSVI algorithms.