Fuel-Saving Navigation System in VANETs

Because of shortage of raw materials, the energy-saving issues become popular in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). A VANET is formed by traveling vehicles with communicating capability and thus it brings various applications. Navigation system is one of important applications in VANETs. The traditional navigation system usually plans a shortest path for users according to geographic maps but the planned path may become a slower one due to the traffic congestion. A congestion path not only delays the traveling time but wastes fuel. So the real-time traffic information should be considered while constructing a navigation path. In this paper, we propose a navigation system to find a fuel-saving navigation path by considering real-time traffic information. In order to estimate the traffic load on the future path, we maintain a table of historical traffic information by Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Furthermore, our system can dynamically change the navigation path by updating traffic information. In the simulation results, our approach can save more than 20% fuel consumption when vehicles travel in a traffic congestion environment.