A novel method based on VANET for alleviating traffic congestion in urban transportations

The traffic congestion frequently occurs in urban transportations. In order to alleviate the traffic congestion, the vehicle information and communication system (VICS) has been developed. However, since each vehicle can obtain global information on traffic congestion using VICS, all vehicles in the congested areas tend to move to non-congested areas. As a result, the non-congested areas become congested areas. To avoid such the oscillation between the congested and non-congested areas, this paper proposes a novel method based on the vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) for alleviating traffic congestion in urban transportations. In the proposed method, since each vehicle independently collects local information on traffic congestion using VANET, traffic can be distributed from congested areas to non-congested areas. Through simulation experiments, this paper shows that the proposed method provides faster velocity and shorter trip time than VICS in the environments that traffic varies temporally and spatially, which occur in urban transportations.