Road traffic congestion detection through cooperative Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications

Cooperative vehicular systems are being developed to improve traffic safety and management. Reducing road traffic congestion can be achieved through effective management strategies. In this sense, mechanisms for its rapid and accurate detection that allow evaluating the road network performance are crucial. Current Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) require the deployment of infrastructure sensors to monitor traffic conditions. Their installation is often expensive and their capability to provide accurate traffic information is limited. In this context, this paper proposes CoTEC (COperative Traffic congestion detECtion), a novel cooperative technique based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications and fuzzy logic to detect road traffic congestion without the need to deploy infrastructure sensors. The proposed technique is also capable to accurately detect the traffic congestion intensity and length.