Traffic Congestion Awareness and On-Demand Distribution in Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks in California I-210 Freeway

2026-09-28

AI Summary

This study addresses the excessive redundant copies and high resource consumption caused by traditional flooding strategies in vehicular delay-tolerant networks (V-DTNs) by proposing an event-aware, on-demand message dissemination mechanism. Leveraging real-world PeMS traffic data to construct congestion scenarios on the I-210 freeway, the method integrates edge computing with a lane-level free-flow speed prediction model. It further designs a dynamic threshold strategy that accounts for congestion recurrence patterns and duration, effectively suppressing futile broadcasts triggered by transient, self-resolving events. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces network overhead and congestion while enhancing message delivery reliability and decreasing latency. These findings also validate the critical role of historical speed data in enabling accurate congestion prediction within V-DTN environments.

Abstract

In vehicular networks under edge computing environments, vehicle-to-vehicle delay-tolerant networking (V-DTN) can disseminate congestion warnings to other vehicles via a store-carry-forward mechanism, helping them proactively choose suitable routes. However, most existing in-vehicle information dissemination methods rely on flooding or limited flooding strategies, broadcasting alerts across the entire network whenever congestion is detected. This leads to excessive redundant copies and consumes node cache space. To address this issue, this paper proposes a congestion-event- aware on-demand message dissemination mechanism. By considering the recurrence and duration of congestion, the mechanism suppresses broadcasts of short-lived, self-dissipating congestion events. Based on real-world PeMS data from California's I-210 corridor, we construct an I-210 Freeway Traffic Congestion Use Case. Experiments show that predicting congestion recurrence heavily relies on historical free-flow speed data of lanes. Without incorporating additional feature dimensions, the accuracy of modeling and comparing lane free-flow speeds across different day types outweighs the choice of machine learning models, and such patterns are difficult to reproduce in simulators. Meanwhile, congestion duration prediction serves effectively as the basis for dynamic-threshold on-demand dissemination in V-DTN, which demonstrate that machine learning-based congestion awareness combined with dynamic-threshold on-demand dissemination significantly reduces network resource consumption and network-layer congestion, enhances delivery reliability, and lowers delivery latency.

Problem

• Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks
• Traffic Congestion
• Message Dissemination
• Edge Computing
• Network Resource Consumption

Innovation

• Vehicular Delay-Tolerant Networks
• On-Demand Dissemination
• Congestion Awareness
• Dynamic Threshold
• Machine Learning