A Logic-Based Clustering Approach for Cooperative Traffic Control Systems

Cooperative traffic control-systems have helped in the last years to extend the electronic horizon of vehicles in such a way that drivers can be informed quite in advance about any unexpected event occurring along a road. In this area, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) perform information exchanges between vehicles by exploiting decentralized structures, where each vehicle is equipped with On Board Units (OBU) that allow to broadcast signals. In this paper, we revisit this communication framework by using a centralized approach, i.e., we consider a central unit for the data processing. This approach, on the one hand, facilitates the clustering process, thus obtaining the mitigation of the "broadcast storm" phenomenon (typically affecting VANETs); on the other hand, it allows the collection, management, and storage of the most relevant data concerning roads. Along the paper we evaluate the benefits of using our model, as well as we discuss on a smartphone integration.