Intelligent Traffic Control Based on IEEE 802.11 DCF/PCF Mechanisms at Intersections

The research on driverless cars has been making much progress lately. In this paper, we propose a new traffic control system without traffic lights at an intersection. We assume a system with fully autonomous driverless cars, and infrastructure to avoid collision completely. When automobiles approach an intersection, they communicates with the access point in both random access mode and polling mode, and the movement of the automobiles will be coordinated by the infrastructure (access point). Traffic congestion is very difficult to predict and deal with because it is a function of many unknown factors such as number of cars, weather, road constructions, accidents, etc. The proposed algorithm is designed for urban road networks to ease the congestion, and make it more predictable at the same time. A key idea of this paper is that IEEE 802.11 DCF/PCF mechanisms are used to control traffic flow for driverless cars when there are no traffic lights at an intersection. The algorithm utilizes the concept of contention/contention-free period of IEEE 802.11 to find a balance between efficiency of traffic flow and fairness between users.