A distributed traffic navigation system using vehicular communication

Traffic congestion leads to significant cost in terms of time, money and influence on the environment. To alleviate the effect through situational awareness, various traffic service providers aggregate traffic information using a variety of inputs such as probes, toll collection etc. This aggregated information is fed back to the drivers to achieve congestion avoidance and provide arrival-time estimates. In this paper, we outline a framework for a distributed vehicle traffic navigation system. The proposed system leverages a multi-hop vehicular network to gather local information. Such information can be elusive to traffic service providers in terms of timeliness and accuracy. Based on the gathered information, a distributed scheme is proposed that locally determines the shortest time travel paths. The proposed system can function independently or can complement an existing infrastructure-based system and can capture the dependence between route decisions of different vehicles in a given area. Based on performance evaluations, we observe that the proposed protocol can significantly enhance local route decisions leading to better traffic flow and road utilization.