Data Collection for the Detection of Urban Traffic Congestion by VANETs

Vehicle traffic congestion has become a serious urban phenomenon in recent years, resulting in a large number of negative effects both on economy and ecology. Thus, finding a way to detect traffic congestion is a highly urgent problem to be solved by scientists and politicians throughout the world. One new promising approach is the usage of vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). In this paper, we study different models of detecting traffic congestion, and propose two broadcast methods, restricted 2-hop broadcast (R2HB) and probabilistic restricted 2-hop broadcast (PR2HB), used for data collection in the context of vehicle to road side unit (RSU) communication. Simulations show that R2HB and PR2HB work efficiently and expand the detection range of RSU significantly.