Novel Decentralized Approach to Discover Automobile Congestion

Everyone complains about being stuck in traffic. Many people waste their time being in automobile traffic and millions of gallons of fuel are wasted all around the world. Discovering congestion and disseminating the congestion information can assist drivers to take alternate routes. There are several centralized approaches to discover automobile congestion. Centralized approaches have significant problems. It will not be practical to implement centralized systems in all roads and will not be available everywhere. Decentralized approaches like Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) play a major role in discovering congestion and disseminating congestion information. Provision of more information to drivers will help them decide on the most effective route. Traffic volume is a valuable parameter for drivers to anticipate the state of the congestion. The moderate amount of research that has been done to date on discovering congestion has been based on GPS. The research proposes an alternative to GPS based system to discover congestion and traffic volume. The proposed idea discovers congestion by observing the neighbour beacons and a tree based counting algorithm is used to count the total number of nodes in congestion. Tree based counting algorithms are used in sensor networks. In sensor networks nodes are fixed, where as in VANET nodes have high mobility. Congestion keeps the node fixed and provides the opportunity to run a tree based algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed idea can be used to discover congestion and to count the number of vehicles in congestion.