Vehicular Communication and Mobility Sustainability: the Mutual Impacts in Large-scale Smart Cities

Abstract

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) is the backbone of transportation services in smart cities. ITSs produce better-informed decisions using real-time data gathered from connected vehicles. In ITSs, Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a communication infrastructure responsible for exchanging data between vehicles and Traffic Management Centers (TMC). VANET performance (packet delay and drop rate) can affect the performance of ITS applications. Furthermore, the distribution of communicating vehicles affects the VANET performance. So, capturing this mutual impact between communication and transportation is crucial to understanding the behavior of ITS applications. Thus, this paper focuses on studying the mutual impact of VANET communication and mobility in city-level ITSs. We first introduce a new scalable and computationally fast framework for modeling large-scale ITSs including communication and mobility. In the proposed framework, we develop and validate a new mathematical model for the IEEE 802.11p MAC protocol which can capture the behavior of medium access and queuing process. This MAC model is then integrated within a microscopic traffic simulator to accurately simulate vehicle mobility. This integrated framework can accurately capture the mobility, communication, and the spatiotemporal impacts in large-scale ITSs. Secondly, the proposed framework is used to study the impact of communication on eco-routing navigation performance in a real large-scale network with real calibrated vehicular traffic. The paper demonstrates that communication performance can significantly degrade the performance of the dynamic eco-routing navigation when the traffic density is high. It also shows that the fuel consumption can be increased due to lack of communication reliability.