Congestion-Aware Routing (CAR):Vehicular Traffic Routing Based on Real-Time Road Occupancy Estimates

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of routing vehicular traffic on road networks. Fair routing is effected using real-time data acquired from a sensor network superimposed on road networks. Routing information is in the form of which route provides the fastest set of interlinked road segments between any departure-destination pair of nodes. The work adopts Dijkstra’s Shortest Path First (SPF) routing algorithm and derives a suitable routing metric from road occupancy data as a major contribution of this work that makes the SPF algorithm applicable to vehicular traffic routing on road networks. Also, a hypothetical road network and a corresponding Mobile App is used to illustrate our novel vehicular traffic routing algorithm. It is shown in this work that the method is more practical and easier to realize than a method in literature — Spatial and Traffic Aware Vehicular Routing (STAR).