Smoothing Vehicular Traffic Flow with VGrid.

In this paper the authors explore distributed controls to smooth traffic and reduce traffic incidents. This is achieved with the assistance of VGrid: an ad hoc networking and computing grid formed by leveraging inter-vehicle wireless communications. In addition to exchanging data between vehicles, VGrid actively uses pertinent data to perform computations for solvingtraffic-related problems. Through the use of real-time position and velocity information exchanged over the network, two distributed traffic smoothing algorithms, accident alert and variable speed limited control, are implemented in a VGrid environment. Using an extensive simulation tool whichincorporates both a comprehensive wireless network model and a realistic vehicle mobility model, the authors show that these VGrid based distributed control algorithms reduce vehicle speed variance under both incident-free and incident conditions.