Real-time vehicle route guidance using vehicle-to-vehicle communication

With advances in wireless communications and global position system-enabled devices (such as cellular phones, PDAs and car PCs), vehicle route guidance systems gradually become indispensable equipments for more and more automobile drivers because of its great convenience. Conventional route guidance systems are designed to direct a vehicle along the shortest path from the origin to the destination. However, usually, the shortest path does not result in the smallest travel time because of the dynamic traffic conditions on roadways. Therefore the state-of-the-art route guidance systems incorporate real-time traffic information to find better paths. There are two types of approaches to collecting real-time traffic information: infrastructure-based approach and infrastructure-free approach. The authors adopt infrastructure-free approach to develop a real-time route guidance algorithm, called V2R2 (Vehicle-to-Vehicle Real-time Routing). Our simulation results showed that V2R2 algorithm can effectively find better paths with less travel time than the shortest path. In addition, it can bypass void areas (i.e. the areas containing empty roads) when collecting real-time traffic information. The simulation results validate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed V2R2 algorithm.