Abstract

One of the most interesting and promising challenges for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) relates to the traffic congestion problem. Congestion is a relevant issue for transportation because it reduces the efficiency of infrastructure and increases travel time, air pollution, and fuel consumption. Nowadays, the most promising technology in support of ITSs is found in the domain of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). In this paper, we propose three protocols that are able to transmit traffic information for routes of interest on VANETs without any Road Side Unit (RSU) support. The proposed protocols adopt strategies to improve the performance of packet routing based on the density and location of vehicles; moreover, they enable an interesting comparison of the performance achievable with either reactive or proactive approaches. The extensive performance results reported show how it is possible to limit the congestion monitoring overhead along Routes of Interest (ROIs), while maintaining a sufficiently high performance in terms of traffic reporting. This may be done by employing context-aware data delivery techniques that autonomously adapt to runtime conditions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.