A traffic balanced mechanism for path recommendations in vehicular ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we investigate the bottleneck traffic problems that are caused and/or amplified by path recommendation protocols in use. Distributed path recommendation protocols construct the path towards each destination in a hop-by-hop fashion. In some scenarios most of traveling vehicles, arriving the road intersection from several input road segments, are recommended to leave at the same output road segment. This is due to the fact that traveling vehicles are heading towards the same destination or close located destinations. Then, the paper introduces a traffic balancing mechanism (Bal-Traf) that eliminates the traffic congestion over road networks. At each road intersection, Bal-Traf distributes the input traffic among the output road segments towards the targeted destinations. From the experimental results we can see Bal-Traf completely eliminates the bottleneck problem over the road network.