Congestion Control utilizing Software Defined Control Architecture at the Traffic Light Intersection

Due to rapid increment in the number of vehicles but limited physical transport infrastructure, cities are crowded with vehicles which led to high congestion. The congestion in cities causes many environmental issues such as noise pollution, air pollution, carbon emissions, etc. This work proposes a Software Defined-Control enabled Traffic Light Control System (SDTLCS), which detects congestion in the city and generates traffic light control signals to minimize congestion. SDTLCS is utilized to generate the congestion control signals at the traffic light junctions considering the several vehicular dynamics of the current traffic state. This model assigns weights to the different types of vehicles, and it considers the cumulative sum of the weights corresponding to vehicles on the road lanes to determine the time duration for each phase. The proposed architecture consists of control nodes as the traffic light controllers and the normal sensor nodes lying on the data plane, i.e., roadside units/other sensors, to collect the traffic data. This proposed architecture has been assessed by running the simulation over a map of the Gwalior district using the well-known simulation tool, i.e., Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO). The results showed that the proposed architectural model was successful in order to improve several performance metrics, i.e., average waiting time, average speed, etc in comparison to other state-of-the-art methods.