In addition, the continuous
exchange of messages between vehicles that include
information about their locations and speed could also
represent a very powerful tool for each vehicle to continuously
monitor its local road traffic conditions in a distributed manner
and without requiring the deployment of a large number of
infrastructure sensors or nodes. In this context, this paper
presents and evaluates CoTEC (COperative Traffic congestion
detECtion), a novel technique to efficiently detect road traffic
congestion using V2V communications. The proposed
technique is able to control the communications overhead
required for such detection. In addition, and to the authors’
knowledge, it is the first technique that is also capable of
providing valuable information to road traffic managers about
the characteristics of the detected congestion conditions, for
example, its location, length and intensity.