Traffic congestion detection in large-scale scenarios using vehicle-to-vehicle communications

Cooperative vehicular systems are currently being investigated to design innovative ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) solutions for road traffic management and safety. Through the wireless exchange of information between vehicles, and between vehicles and infrastructure nodes, cooperative systems can support novel decentralized strategies for ubiquitous and more cost-attractive traffic monitoring. In this context, this paper presents and evaluates CoTEC (COperative Traffic congestion detECtion), a novel cooperative technique based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications designed to detect road traffic congestion. CoTEC is evaluated under large-scale highway scenarios using iTETRIS, a unique open source simulation platform created to investigate the impact of cooperative vehicular systems. The obtained results demonstrate CoTEC's capability to accurately detect and characterize road traffic congestion conditions under different traffic scenarios and V2V penetration rates. In particular, CoTEC results in congestion detection probabilities higher than 90%. These results are obtained without overloading the cooperative communications channel. In fact, CoTEC reduces the communications overhead needed to detect road traffic congestions compared to related techniques by 88%. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.