Enhancing Traffic Efficiency and Safety Through the Use of Wireless Vehicle Communication

The understanding of real vehicular traffic facilitated recently with 3-phase traffic theory and advances in ad-hoc networking based on wireless vehicle communication (V2X) can enhance traffic efficiency and safety considerably in the near future. To evaluate the true potential of V2X communication, both field tests and simulation studies are needed. The latter can be used to get early results and to study aspects that due to cost and complexity might not be covered by field tests. This article describes a simulation approach in which vehicle motion in traffic flow and analyses of a vehicle communication channel access based on the IEEE 802.11p mechanism, radio propagation modeling, message reception characteristics, as well as other effects associated with traffic and ad-hoc networks are integrated into a 3-phase traffic flow model. This model simulates traffic as found in measured traffic data, allowing for the additional simulation of cooperative driving behavior and its effect on traffic at bottlenecks, moving jam emergence, as well as the effect of a danger warning message breakdown vehicle ahead on traffic flow.