Reducing Delay and CO2 Emissions in Multi-lane Intersections using Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Abstract

Traffic delay is one of the major problems facing drivers worldwide, leading to waste in time and fuel. The biased nature of traffic light signals leads to allowing more time to lanes which sometimes have less traffic. This work contributes in reducing delay in multi-lane intersections using Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET). The goal of the proposed system is to distribute time among lanes with respect to the amount of traffic. Two scenarios are simulated for the movement of vehicles in the intersection. The first scenario simulates the non adaptive situation, where the traffic signal changes at a fixed predetermined time. The second scenario represents the proposed adaptive model which makes use of position messages sent to the Road Side Unit. The information from these messages is used to adapt the duration of green traffic signals for each lane with respect to traffic density. Our results show a maximum of 30% reduction in vehicle latency and improved performance when employing traffic light adaptation. The proposed system also reduces CO 2 emissions by up to 9%.