A Framework for Decentralised Vehicular Services

Rudi Ball, Naranker Dulay, Engineering And Physical Sciences Research Council ; Imperial College London
2012
Traffic management is an old and growing problem within cities with inefficient road use resulting in significant economic costs. Existing traffic management solutions are typically large centralised systems which rely on central authorities for control. Furthermore, these systems are costly to setup, deploy and maintain. Within the near future it is expected that Vehicle-to-X (V2X) technologies will become integrated into both vehicles and transportation infrastructures. V2X technologies allow
more » ... vehicles and road-side infrastructure to communicate with one another using ad-hoc wireless communications. In this thesis we present a unique vehicular framework for the development and prototyping of decentralised vehicular services which exploit available V2X technologies. The framework uses discrete event simulation to evaluate the operation of a decentralised vehicular service. The decentralised services presented within the thesis are unique as they require a combination of scaled ad-hoc inter-vehicle messaging, mobility data and cooperation to enable communities of road vehicles to provide services to one another. Vehicles manage themselves in their local space to approximate the outcomes of centralised services. As vehicular services are decentralised they reduce the costs associated with deploying and supporting traffic services. Using the framework we prototype two novel decentralised traffic control protocols which evaluate the problems of travel time estimation and intersection control. Each protocol is evaluated in a scaled scenario which emphasises the usage and requirement of fine grained geographic mobility traces which mimic real city road maps. We show that decentralised approaches provide a feasible means of providing vehicular services to users. We evaluate the trade-offs and performance issues resulting from their use.
doi:10.25560/9699 fatcat:7i5qpzp64vebpegbhjkhipwzli