The goal of this project is to develop solutions to reduce congestion problem in urban area. Each vehicle will be equipped with GPS and dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) capability in the near future. In congested urban areas, Road Side Units (RSUs) and Relay Nodes (RNs) are deployed. Each vehicle entering these areas will report its trajectory (i.e., a selective path to a destination) based on GPS to a Control Center via an RSU. RSUs can monitor the vehicles passing by and assist the data delivery between Control Center and vehicle or vehicle to RSUs. The Control Center will be responsible for deciding how to smooth the traffic based on the current traffic load by adjusting the trajectories of some vehicles or sending warning message to vehicles in certain areas. This project is to investigate the feasibility and three associated research issues of such an infrastructure. The research issues to be addressed are 1) How to cost effectively deploy the minimum numbers of RSUs and RNs in a given roadmap to guarantee the delay and performance of data dissemination in such an infrastructure? 2) How to effectively deliver data from vehicles to RSU and from RSU to vehicles? 3) How to disseminate traffic related warning messages to vehicles that may be affected by a given traffic incidence in a timely and effective manner? This project is expected to advance the understanding of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications to a higher level. Moreover, this project has a substantial impact to the society. Not only can the commute of each person be shortened, but also the total energy saving and its associated environmental impact can be huge.
