An efficient detection scheme for urban traffic condition using volunteer probes

In urban areas, traffic congestion has become a common phenomenon resulting in a great waste of time and fuel. Thus, the real-time detection for road condition becomes a significant challenge for both scientists and engineers. Recently, the technology of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) has been utilized to alleviate this problem, and becomes an important component of the intelligent transportation system (ITS). In this paper, we propose a novel detection scheme for urban traffic condition only by volunteer probes. The travel time for detected road segment is used to evaluate the traffic condition. To reduce the influence of individuals, a T Window Algorithm (TWA) is designed for calculating the average travel time of probes. For performance optimization, three kinds of Adaptive T Window Algorithm (ATWA) are put forward to resize window according to the probe density. Besides, on analysis of travel time composition, a congestion line is built to identify the traffic status of road segment. Finally, all the approaches are validated in a realistic scenario. The simulation results show that our scheme can detect urban traffic condition effectively.