Traffic balancing-based path recommendation mechanisms in vehicular networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose both reactive and proactive balancing traffic path recommendation mechanisms, which we refer to as Bal-Traf and Abs-Bal, respectively. Bal-Traf is initiated when a certain output road segment located at any road intersection is detected in an overloaded situation. In the event that the existing traffic density of any output road exceeds its optimal capacity, Bal-Traf recommends that those vehicles that plan to pass over this road segment as next hop choose another, less congested output road segment. On the other hand, Abs-Bal is a proactive balancing traffic mechanism. Its main purpose is to distribute input traffic completely even among all output road segments at intersections. Moreover, Abs-Bal considers the best travel time of vehicles in addition to the goal of balancing traffic. From the experimental results, we can see that Bal-Traf eliminates the number of overwhelmed road segments over the road network in scenarios with only partial network congestion. It also decreases the number of congested road segments in scenarios with complete network congestion. However, it increases the density drastically over the remaining congested road segments in these scenarios. Abs-Bal performs well in decreasing the percentage of congested road segments and balancing traffic among road segments located throughout the road network, in the event of complete network congestion.