Since all vehicles in that area reply to every congestion information request, the
communications overhead and risk to saturate the cooperative channel is potentially high. The mechanism reported in [7]
reduces the risk of communications overload by only making traffic congestion estimates locally at each vehicle using
pattern recognition techniques that exploit the information received from nearby vehicles through their CAMs. The fact
that the traffic congestion estimates are not validated or correlated among various vehicles may lead to unreliable
detections. This limitation is overcome in [8], where a voting procedure is employed through which nearby vehicles
exchange their traffic estimates and try to reach a consensus decision.