LOCUS: Efficient Urban Transportation Using Localized Vehicular Coordination

Abstract

An efficient transportation system plays a significant role in the functioning of a smart city system. The ability of the vehicles to make the correct decisions regarding the selection of the right path at the right time to reach their destination is a crucial component of an efficient transportation system. However, dynamic decision-making during busy hours in congested cities becomes a challenging task due to frequent updates in the traffic status of the road fragments. While live coordination among the vehicles is a highly essential component, it suffers from serious scalability problems with the rapid rise in the number of vehicles as well as the area to be covered. Existing solutions to address this problem are mostly centralized and depend on efficient cloud services. Keeping in mind the serious vulnerabilities of the centralized solutions, in this work we design an efficient decentralized IoT-based framework LOCUS to enable the vehicle to coordinate with each other to solve the problem. LOCUS exploits recent advancements in the domain of Synchronous-Transmission (ST) to achieve efficient and fast local dissemination of traffic-status data enabling required re-planning of the path on-the-fly. Simulation-based evaluation shows that LOCUS achieves up to approx. 51% lesser average travel time compared to the existing best-known decentralized solution. � 2024 IEEE.