Utilization of V2X Communications for Vehicle Queue Length Estimation

In these days, traffic lights are controlled by coordinated controllers at intersections which monitor traffic patterns with the assistance of devices like video cameras and sensors. The video camera-based monitoring requires high computing power for image processing and the sensor-based monitoring requires high sensor installation cost. Therefore, in this paper, we propose cost-effective traffic control mechanisms utilizing vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications which does not require high computing power or high installation cost. For the sake of efficiency of V2I communications, we propose a mechanism that reduces the number of transmissions without losing the accuracy of vehicle queue length estimation. The proposed mechanism gives transmission preference to the vehicles near the end of the vehicle queue, so that the other vehicles closer to the stop line give up transmissions. For the performance evaluation of the proposed mechanism, we carry out simulations by using the vehicular network simulation framework Veins based on SUMO and OMNet++, and measure the number of transmitted messages and the accuracy of the estimated vehicle queue length.