Vehicular Traffic Management Based on Traffic Engineering for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Urbanization causes many problems to human mobility, since people living in the cities tend to increase the vehicular traffic flow. City road infrastructure does not increase faster than the number of vehicles, thus causing traffic congestion in dense urban centers. Besides travel delay, vehicular traffic congestion results in serious problems to human beings (e.g., health problems due to stress), to the planet (e.g., increase in pollution) and to the economy (e.g., waste of a large amount of money due to time spent in traffic jams). In order to improve vehicular traffic flow in dense urban areas, this paper presents a new Vehicular Traffic Management Service based on Traffic Engineering theory, called Re-RouTE. The Re-RouTE service relies on the density of vehicles in roads and applies the flow-density macroscopic traffic engineering model to identify congested routes. Roads are represented by a weighted graph, which is then used to discover routes without traffic jams and with a small increase in the travel distance. The main goal of Re-RouTE is to reduce traffic jams while increasing the global vehicular traffic flow of the road network. Moreover, the service was designed to reduce traffic jams instead of moving them to a different road/area. Simulation results show the ability of Re-RouTE to improve travel time, travel distance, speed and the number of messages transmitted when compared to a literature solution.