A Study on Gossiping in Transportation Networks

To alleviate road congestion, suggestions have been made to equip cars with wireless communication to allow drivers to exchange information. This information is used to bypass congested areas. We study the dynamics of this solution using a hybrid microsimulation tool that we have developed and show that gossiping is an efficient method of information propagation. An increase in the number of gossiping agents leads to a faster and wider distribution of information. On the other hand, as in other information models, when the number of agents obtaining information about road conditions increases, their routing performance may decrease (unless smarter algorithms are deployed) since they will all attempt to use the same uncongested roads. Nevertheless, when the number of gossiping agents is balanced (20%-30% in our simulations), the average traveling time of gossiping agents is similar to the average traveling time of those who obtain information from a centralized information center.