Congestion-aware messaging reduces traffic alerts in vehicle networks
Traffic Congestion Awareness and On-Demand Distribution in Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks in California I-210 Freeway
Networking and Internet Architecture
Summary
Traffic jams on highways can cause big problems, and it's helpful if cars can warn each other about them. The authors looked at how vehicles can share congestion alerts more efficiently, so cars only send warnings when the traffic jams are likely to stick around. They found using past traffic speed patterns helps predict serious congestions better than fancy models alone. Their approach saves communication resources and helps cars get warnings faster and more reliably.
What this means in practice
- •For automotive network engineers: Implement efficient congestion warning systems that reduce redundant broadcasts and improve message delivery speed using historical traffic patterns.
- •For traffic management teams: Enhance real-time traffic alert distribution on highways by predicting persistent congestion and suppressing alerts for short-lived jams.
Tested on one dataset.
Authors
Xiaofei Liu, Milena Radenkovic
Abstract
In vehicular networks under edge computing environments, vehicle-to-vehicle delay-tolerant networking (V-DTN) can disseminate congestion warnings to other vehicles via a store-carry-forward mechanism, helping them proactively choose suitable routes. However, most existing in-vehicle information dissemination methods rely on flooding or limited flooding strategies, broadcasting alerts across the entire network whenever congestion is detected. This leads to excessive redundant copies and consumes node cache space. To address this issue, this paper proposes a congestion-event- aware on-demand message dissemination mechanism. By considering the recurrence and duration of congestion, the mechanism suppresses broadcasts of short-lived, self-dissipating congestion events. Based on real-world PeMS data from California's I-210 corridor, we construct an I-210 Freeway Traffic Congestion Use Case. Experiments show that predicting congestion recurrence heavily relies on historical free-flow speed data of lanes. Without incorporating additional feature dimensions, the accuracy of modeling and comparing lane free-flow speeds across different day types outweighs the choice of machine learning models, and such patterns are difficult to reproduce in simulators. Meanwhile, congestion duration prediction serves effectively as the basis for dynamic-threshold on-demand dissemination in V-DTN, which demonstrate that machine learning-based congestion awareness combined with dynamic-threshold on-demand dissemination significantly reduces network resource consumption and network-layer congestion, enhances delivery reliability, and lowers delivery latency.