Evaluation of a neighbor-based vehicle density estimation scheme

Vehicle density is one of the main metrics used for assessing the road traffic condition. A high vehicle density usually indicates that the traffic is congested. Currently, most of the vehicle density estimation approaches are designed for the infrastructure-based traffic information systems. These approaches require detecting devices such as inductive loop detectors or traffic surveillance cameras to be installed at various locations. Consequently, they are not suitable for an emerging self-organizing vehicular traffic information system, where the vehicles have to collect and process the traffic information without relying on any fixed infrastructure. In this paper, we consider a method for estimating the vehicle density based on the number of vehicles in the vicinity of the probe vehicle and evaluate its performance.