Taking advantage of V2V communications for traffic management

Real time information to vehicular users is proposing new challenging questions to which wireless systems designers are called to answer. Nowadays many vehicles are already equipped with devices able to connect to cellular networks, and to transmit and receive in real time traffic information through vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. Focusing on the uplink transmission of real time measurements, this is leading to high costs in terms of network load and billing. In this work we discuss the opportunity to take advantage of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) in addition to V2I communications to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted from vehicles to a remote control center, and thus also to reduce the resulting costs for transmissions over the cellular networks. Having in mind to allow a first understanding of the achievable advantages, we propose a simple mathematical model through which we discuss how many vehicles are necessary to guarantee an useful V2V communication and which are the advantages in terms of network load and, consequently, costs reductions for the V2I network. © 2011 IEEE.