Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is attracting many researchers with the emergence of autonomous or smart vehicles. Vehicles on the road are becoming smart objects equipped with lots of sensors and powerful computing and communication capabilities. In the IoV environment, the efficiency of road transp...

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Main Authors: Sanghyun Ahn, Jonghwa Choi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2019-03-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/6/1275
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author Sanghyun Ahn
Jonghwa Choi
author_facet Sanghyun Ahn
Jonghwa Choi
author_sort Sanghyun Ahn
collection DOAJ
description The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is attracting many researchers with the emergence of autonomous or smart vehicles. Vehicles on the road are becoming smart objects equipped with lots of sensors and powerful computing and communication capabilities. In the IoV environment, the efficiency of road transportation can be enhanced with the help of cost-effective traffic signal control. Traffic signal controllers control traffic lights based on the number of vehicles waiting for the green light (in short, vehicle queue length). So far, the utilization of video cameras or sensors has been extensively studied as the intelligent means of the vehicle queue length estimation. However, it has the deficiencies like high computing overhead, high installation and maintenance cost, high susceptibility to the surrounding environment, etc. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the vehicular communication-based approach for intelligent traffic signal control in a cost-effective way with low computing overhead and high resilience to environmental obstacles. In the vehicular communication-based approach, traffic signals are efficiently controlled at no extra cost by using the pre-equipped vehicular communication capabilities of IoV. Vehicular communications allow vehicles to send messages to traffic signal controllers (i.e., vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications) so that they can estimate vehicle queue length based on the collected messages. In our previous work, we have proposed a mechanism that can accomplish the efficiency of vehicular communications without losing the accuracy of traffic signal control. This mechanism gives transmission preference to the vehicles farther away from the traffic signal controller, so that the other vehicles closer to the stop line give up transmissions. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism enhancing the previous mechanism by selecting the vehicles performing V2I communications based on the concept of road sectorization. In the mechanism, only the vehicles within specific areas, called sectors, perform V2I communications to reduce the message transmission overhead. For the performance comparison of our mechanisms, we carry out simulations by using the Veins vehicular network simulation framework and measure the message transmission overhead and the accuracy of the estimated vehicle queue length. Simulation results verify that our vehicular communication-based approach significantly reduces the message transmission overhead without losing the accuracy of the vehicle queue length estimation.
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spelling doaj.art-7f8522c45357430e8f060c8f386ae5072022-12-22T01:57:46ZengMDPI AGSensors1424-82202019-03-01196127510.3390/s19061275s19061275Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal ControlSanghyun Ahn0Jonghwa Choi1Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, KoreaDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, KoreaThe Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is attracting many researchers with the emergence of autonomous or smart vehicles. Vehicles on the road are becoming smart objects equipped with lots of sensors and powerful computing and communication capabilities. In the IoV environment, the efficiency of road transportation can be enhanced with the help of cost-effective traffic signal control. Traffic signal controllers control traffic lights based on the number of vehicles waiting for the green light (in short, vehicle queue length). So far, the utilization of video cameras or sensors has been extensively studied as the intelligent means of the vehicle queue length estimation. However, it has the deficiencies like high computing overhead, high installation and maintenance cost, high susceptibility to the surrounding environment, etc. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the vehicular communication-based approach for intelligent traffic signal control in a cost-effective way with low computing overhead and high resilience to environmental obstacles. In the vehicular communication-based approach, traffic signals are efficiently controlled at no extra cost by using the pre-equipped vehicular communication capabilities of IoV. Vehicular communications allow vehicles to send messages to traffic signal controllers (i.e., vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications) so that they can estimate vehicle queue length based on the collected messages. In our previous work, we have proposed a mechanism that can accomplish the efficiency of vehicular communications without losing the accuracy of traffic signal control. This mechanism gives transmission preference to the vehicles farther away from the traffic signal controller, so that the other vehicles closer to the stop line give up transmissions. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism enhancing the previous mechanism by selecting the vehicles performing V2I communications based on the concept of road sectorization. In the mechanism, only the vehicles within specific areas, called sectors, perform V2I communications to reduce the message transmission overhead. For the performance comparison of our mechanisms, we carry out simulations by using the Veins vehicular network simulation framework and measure the message transmission overhead and the accuracy of the estimated vehicle queue length. Simulation results verify that our vehicular communication-based approach significantly reduces the message transmission overhead without losing the accuracy of the vehicle queue length estimation.http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/6/1275Internet of VehiclesInternet of Thingstraffic signal controlvehicle queuevehicular communication
spellingShingle Sanghyun Ahn
Jonghwa Choi
Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control
Sensors
Internet of Vehicles
Internet of Things
traffic signal control
vehicle queue
vehicular communication
title Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control
title_full Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control
title_fullStr Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control
title_full_unstemmed Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control
title_short Internet of Vehicles and Cost-Effective Traffic Signal Control
title_sort internet of vehicles and cost effective traffic signal control
topic Internet of Vehicles
Internet of Things
traffic signal control
vehicle queue
vehicular communication
url http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/6/1275
work_keys_str_mv AT sanghyunahn internetofvehiclesandcosteffectivetrafficsignalcontrol
AT jonghwachoi internetofvehiclesandcosteffectivetrafficsignalcontrol