An efficient traffic management protocol based on IEEE802.11p standard

Abstract

Nowadays one of the hot themes in wireless environment research is the application of the newest technologies to road security problems. The interest of companies and researchers, with the cooperation of car manufactures, brought to life and promoted the Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) technology. In this work an innovative security system based on VANET architecture is proposed. The system is capable of increasing road safety through the inter-communication among vehicles and road infrastructures, also known as Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I), matching market and manufactures requests in a convenient and useful way. We design a network protocol called Geocasting Wave (GeoWave) that takes advantages of IEEE802.11p standard and tries to enhance it adding useful messages in order to increase active and passive safety system. In the proposal protocol vehicles share information with neighbors and Road Side Unit (RSU)s. In this work, we propose a network infrastructure able to continuously gather information from environment, road conditions and traffic flows. Once one of these occurrences is detected, all gathered information are spread in the network. This knowledge make possible to take precautionary actions in time such as traveling speed decreasing or switching to a safer road path when a dangerous situation approaches. In addiction, a smart traffic management is made exploiting gathered information by the Control and Management Center (CMC) in order to avoid traffic blocks trying to maintain a constant average speed inside city blocks. This can help to reduce vehicles' Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions in the city increasing air quality.