Virtual Infrastructure at Traffic Lights: Vehicular Temporary Storage Assisted Data Transportation at Signalized Intersections

Abstract

In this correspondence, we propose to exploit vehicles waiting at red lights as virtual network infrastructure, for communication, computing, and storage, based on the observation that there always exists a direction getting red lights at signalized intersections. To illustrate our idea, we study how those vehicles stopping at red lights can be utilized as vehicular temporary storage (VTS) to create more contact opportunities between vehicles at signalized intersections and facilitate timely data transportation. We design a VTS-assisted data transportation scheme through Markov decision processes and demonstrate its effectiveness via simulations.