Efficient Traffic Information Dissemination and Vehicle Navigation for Lower Travel Time in Urban Scenario Using Vehicular Networks

This article presents peer to peer systems for efficient traffic information dissemination and discovery as well as re-routing vehicles to lower travel time in urban environment. Both navigating the vehicles from the sparsest path and sending traffic packets from the paths with the highest density will turn a sparse path to one with congestion and, considering the limited capacity of the network, these packets will be dropped by the intermediate nodes. On the other hand, selecting multiple paths by means of peer to peer layer along with appropriately distributing the vehicles among the selected paths prevents vehicle congestion in various zones and appropriate distribution of the packets among zones with proper density instead of the highest one will stop their dropping by intermediate vehicles. All the same, establishing a peer to peer network on mobile nodes due to their high mobility will increase the overhead of creation and maintenance for the peer to peer network. Roadside unit (RSU) placement in appropriate locations as well as the creation of peer to peer networks on these nodes reduces peer to peer overheads; however, due to the considerable costs of RSU deployment and maintenance, creation of a peer to peer network on RSU would not be affordable. Therefore, this article tries to present a system that deploys a limited number of RSUs in the most appropriate places and uses them as super peer nodes, using vehicle nodes as peer to peer ones in other key intersections, not covered by the RSUs. Such a system reduces the high costs of RSUs’ deployment and maintenance; also lowering the high overhead of creation and maintenance of the peer to peer networks. Simulation results show the appropriate efficiency of the presented systems over the other related methods.