Vehicle-to-vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2V2I) intelligent transportation system architecture

In this paper, I describe the vehicle-to-vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2V2I) architecture, which is a hybrid of the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) architectures. The V2V2I architecture leverages the benefits of fast queries and responses from the V2I architecture, but with the advantage of a distributed architecture not having a single point-of-failure from the V2V architecture. In the V2V2I architecture, the transportation network is broken into zones in which a single vehicle is known as the super vehicle. Only super vehicles are able to communicate with the central infrastructure or with other Super Vehicles, and all other vehicles can only communicate with the super vehicle responsible for the zone in which they are currently traversing. I describe the super vehicle detection (SVD) algorithm for how a vehicle can find or become a super vehicle of a zone and how super vehicles can aggregate the speed and location data from all of the vehicles within their zone to still ensure an accurate representation of the network. I perform an analysis using FreeSim to determine the trade-offs experienced based on the size and number of zones within a transportation network and describe the benefits of the V2V2I architecture over the pure V2I or V2V architectures.