A Novel and Optimised Thread-based Virtual Traffic Light Framework

Abstract

Green intelligent transportation systems have gained tremendous popularity in the recent years. An important aspect of these systems is traffic congestion, which is rapidly becoming one of the most serious problems affecting urban areas. Also, these systems with conventional traffic lights or unregulated junctions result in wastage of time as well as high fuel consumption. Therefore, a new paradigm of thread-based Virtual Traffic Lights (VTL) utilizing a mesh network and Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is proposed in this manuscript. The framework is an apt solution to overcome real-time traffic problems because it is perfect, quick and simple to apply. The proposed framework uses minimal components and, most importantly, does not require any roadside infrastructure. With this new technology, the old system is being replaced by a smart digital system. Instead of putting traffic lights at every intersection, road side unit is being used as a road controller through which all the vehicles get an instant message telling them to drive through the intersection or wait for a moment instead of using traditional traffic lights. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can increase the percentage of traffic flow and the average speed of vehicles with threaded VTL, thereby saving long hours of waiting time. Furthermore, the proposed threaded virtual traffic light framework reduces the average waiting time by 42.85% and increases the average vehicle speed of normal vehicles and emergency vehicles by 43.47% and 35.71% respectively as compared to conventional system, thereby reducing the traffic congestion. In addition to this, the proposed threaded VTL system is compared with existing recent studies and it is inferred that our approach yields the least average waiting time (3. 44 mins), highest average vehicle speed (60 Km/h) and the least computational time (5.26 mins) to execute the flow of traffic. The threaded protocol in the given study can be used to design smart and reliable homes by utilizing the features of optimization and scalability achieved by the proposed framework.