Efficient Detection Scheme for Urban Traffic Congestion Using Buses

Urban traffic congestion has become a global phenomenon in recent years, resulting in a great waste of time and fuel. Thus, it is a great challenge for both scientists and engineers to detect the road condition timely and accurately. The technology of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) applied in intelligent transportation system (ITS) is a new promising approach to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel detection scheme for urban traffic congestion only by buses. In our scheme, the travel time of bus is used to identify the congestion status. To eliminate the influence of individuals, two methods, T-window Average and N-window Average are designed for calculating the average travel time of buses. Additionally, a congestion line is built to evaluate the traffic condition of detected road segment. All the proposed approaches are validated in a realistic scenario. The simulation results show that our scheme can detect urban traffic congestion effectively.