Real-Time Path Planning in Urban Area via VANET-Assisted Traffic Information Sharing

Real-time traffic information can efficiently reflect the traffic condition in urban scenarios. However, how to design an efficient real-time information sharing mechanism to achieve the real-time traveling time estimation (TTE) and dynamic path planning still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we first propose an effective real-time traffic information sharing mechanism based on a distributed transportation system with road-side units, which has lower computing complexity and less redundancy. Then, considering current traffic information, we present a method to estimate the traveling time from a source to a destination in the road network, called TTE, which acts as a metric for path planning. Furthermore, we propose a real-time path planning algorithm based on TTE comparison via information collection to avoid traffic congestion. We verify the complexity and redundancy of our proposed real-time information sharing mechanism via C
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. Moreover, we perform extensive simulations in VanetMobiSim to evaluate the proposed real-time path planning algorithm, which uses the real-world traffic scenario and urban map of Songjiang district in Shanghai. The results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the static path planning algorithm.