A Distributed Intersection Management Protocol for Safety, Efficiency, and Driver's Comfort

Improving safety and convenience is always the top priority in designing today's intelligent transportation system. In this paper, we study the problem of how to manage vehicle traffic at intersections by jointly considering safety, driver's comfort, and efficiency, in vehicular ad hoc networks. We propose a distributed intersection management protocol (DIMP), which distributedly coordinates vehicle traffic from different directions by making vehicles exchange critical driving information and adaptively react based on the information. DIMP dynamically guides vehicles to adjust their speed in a way such that both safety and driver's comfort are satisfied. By following DIMP, vehicles can pass the intersections safely and efficiently at a comfortable speed during acceleration/deceleration. We extensively evaluate DIMP, and the evaluation results show that DIMP is both effective and efficient in managing vehicle traffic at intersections.