V2X Protocols for Low-Penetration-Rate and Cooperative Traffic Estimations

Reducing traffic congestion and improving the efficiency of urban vehicular mobility are widely recognized as central objectives for smart cities. In particular, given the economic/time costs of developing an infrastructure for traffic monitoring and surveillance, there is growing interest in the exploitation of V2V communication technologies to foster new forms of peer-to-peer cooperation and to achieve even coarse-grained estimations of vehicular traffic, also with no need for communication towards global data collection centers. In addition, in realistic scenarios for the next years, it is necessary that such solutions can reasonably work with limited penetration rates of vehicles equipped with V2X traffic surveillance capabilities. In this perspective and within the framework of the ongoing EU FP7 COLOMBO project, we have investigated, developed, and thoroughly evaluated some innovative locality-based cooperation protocols for the determination of traffic characteristics in proximity of intersections, with the goal of offering concise monitoring indicators to optimize traffic light management. The reported results (obtained through realistic simulations based on real traffic traces and the real road topology of the city of Bologna) show that it is possible to achieve reasonable estimations of vehicular traffic, suitable for traffic light control optimization, even if with limited penetration rates of our solution.