Feasibility of virtual traffic lights in non-line-of-sight environments

Abstract

Motivated by the idea to reduce deployment costs and to dynamically regulate vehicular traffic flows at intersections, inter-vehicle communications based virtual traffic lights are envisioned to replace traditional infrastructure based traffic lights. According to recent studies, virtual traffic lights are expected to increase traffic flow by up to 60%. Yet, those studies were based on the assumption of a perfectly reliable communication, i.e., notification messages which signal a traffic light were always received by vehicles located within a certain distance to the sender. Hence, effects such as signal fading or non-line-of-sight conditions due to buildings were neglected. Such effects, however, can have a negative impact on the dissemination of the notification messages. This poster paper therefore studies whether these effects lead to significantly larger dissemination delays or not, and whether this increase is crucial for the feasibility of virtual traffic lights. According to the results of this study, the delay is not significantly larger, and virtual traffic lights seem to be feasible under such challenging conditions.