Traffic Congestion Estimation in VANETs and Its Application to Information Dissemination

Traffic congestion estimation in vehicular ad hoc networks can have many interesting applications. In this paper, we propose two measures of traffic congestion around a vehicle suited for different applications. A scheme for a vehicle to estimate congestion around it is proposed and evaluated through simulations. We also show an application of the estimated congestion for information dissemination to achieve high coverage while sending much less number of redundant messages compared to a flooding based scheme.