Investigating the impact of real-time path planning on reducing vehicles traveling time

There has been an increasing interest in the issue of real-time path planning based on the exchange of information about traffic conditions in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Because of the development in hardware, software, and communication technologies. However, real-time applications are facing several challenges for providing reliable communications (V2V and V2I) due to many effective factors which increase the rate of topology change, including high-speed mobility and sparse vehicle density. In this paper, we first establish a real-time path planning strategy which utilizes real-time information about traffic conditions for providing the shortest paths with minimum travel time. This strategy utilizes vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to enable real-time communications among vehicles, roadside units (RSUs), and a central server. Each vehicle can request a shortest-path by sending a simple request packet to the server and waiting for a reply containing a new route as sequence of turning movements. Finally, our path planning strategy is implemented and simulated based on a real map by using Veins framework (with IEEE 802.11 p/WAVE standard). Veins is capable of running OMNET++ and SUMO in parallel. Simulation results confirm that our proposed path planning approach improves significantly the travel time.