V-Radar: A vehicular traffic query protocol for urban environments

Automobile congestions have an adverse effect in modern societies, causing the loss of billions of dollars and manhours every year throughout the world. In this era of global economic recession, drivers will require the necessary solutions and driving aids that facilitate the improvement of daily road transport and minimize unnecessary expenditure. In this work, we lay the groundwork for V-Radar, a query protocol for retrieving vehicular traffic information using V2V communications. The advantage of V-Radar over related works is its ability to monitor using location-dependent queries the prevailing traffic conditions in a number of road-paths from a vehicle´s current location towards its final destination. We introduce its modular architecture and provide preliminary evaluation results showing significant improvements over a similar scheme.