Discovering Traffic Congestion along Routes of Interest using VANETs

One of the most interesting challenges for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) consists of the traffic congestion problem. Congestion is a big obstacle for transportation since it reduces efficiency of the infrastructure and increases travel time, air pollution and fuel consumption. Nowadays, the most promising technology in support of ITS are Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). In this paper, we propose three protocols able to transmit traffic information for routes of interest on VANETs without any Road Side Unit (RSU) support. The protocols make a comparison between a reactive and a proactive approach and present strategies to improve the routing of the packets based on density and location of the vehicles. The objective is to keep high values of delivery ratio and accuracy using the smallest number of transmissions in order to guarantee scalability and to not saturate the bandwidth with only this type of packets. © 2013 IEEE.