Efficient Acquisition of Local Traffic Information using Inter-Vehicle Communication with Queries

In this paper, we propose an efficient data exchange method for acquiring local traffic information where we use inter-vehicle ad-hoc communication with queries. In the proposed approach, each vehicle disseminates traffic information of its neighborhood and relays it within a few square kilometers. Traffic information of distant areas can be obtained by issuing queries and propagating them using inter-vehicle ad-hoc communication. This makes the time necessary for acquiring neighboring traffic information rather short, nevertheless we can still keep acquisition time of distant traffic information reasonable. The proposed data dissemination protocol CRCP has an autonomous packet collision avoidance mechanism by sensing data dissemination from neighboring vehicles. In this paper, we use VPSQ over CRCP as diseminated data selection. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed approach in a simulator, using realistic traffic models obtained from Toyota Central R&D Lab., Inc. Simulation results reveal the usefulness of the proposed approach.