A Distributed Predictive Road Traffic Management System in Urban VANETs

Nowadays traffic management is considered as a key factor application to enhance transportation system performances. It aims to reduce traffic jams, fuel consumption and to optimise travel time for road users to reach their destinations in the least possible time. This traffic issue is directly affected by congestions generated at intersections when vehicles spend longer time when crossing them. In this paper, we present a distributed predictive road traffic management system for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). It aims at predicting the future road traffic along with a continuous adaptation of routes for each vehicle at each junction to minimise driving time and to avoid future congestions in the network. This work highlights communications between vehicles and road-side units and shows how traffic prediction can be achieved in a distributed way without using a central server. We have implemented our proposal using OMNeT++ simulator and we have measured two performance indicators: the total waiting time and the total driving time in order to evaluate its performances compared to other proposals. These indicators have confirmed that our proposed method has better performances under some conditions.