A real-time path planning for reducing vehicles traveling time in cooperative-intelligent transportation systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have the potential to enable efficient real-time path planning applications capable of handling congestion traffic problems using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, path planning applications are facing the biggest challenges related to the increase in communication cost caused by redundant communications, which has a destructive impact on the overall network performance. So, the communication design should be carefully adjusted to avoid this problem. In this paper, we propose an effective real-time path planning strategy based on a cooperative information -sharing approach between vehicles and RSUs, which takes into account the communication cost by using a shortest path-based relaying of communications between RSUs to avoid communication redundancy. First, the assigned roles for each item in the network are revised to reduce communication cost, for example, vehicles can share travel time information with RSUs by adopting only single hop communications, especially since each RSU can cover a set of road segments in its surrounding region. Next, we propose a simple shortest path-based routing, which is partially similar to Geographic Source Routing (GSR), but it differs from GSR in the way the vehicles relay communications between each other in road segments as we use the weighted p-persistence broadcasting method to reduce unneeded communication redundancy, while under disconnectivity, a carry-and-forward mechanism is used to allow information sharing with next hop RSUs. Both the proposed path planning strategy and the communication architecture are evaluated according to several scenarios and performance metrics. The simulation results show that our strategy can significantly improve vehicles' traveling time on the road as well as decreasing communication cost.