CONGESTION AVOIDANCE SYSTEM USING BEACONS FOR

TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
1

SRIVATSAN SRIDHARAN, 2HIMANSHU SHRIVASTAVA

1,2

Department of Computer Science, IIIT - B , Department of Embedded Systems, IIIT -B

Abstract- This paper briefly discusses the various implementation, advantages, disadvantages of the energy efficient
congestion avoidance system using the traffic signals for the purpose of traffic management in major cities. This is aimed at
providing a solution to the traffic in any big metro cities. This includes the identification of the path where the congestion has
happened and intimating to the nearest possible signals about the congestion in the path. Also the main aim of this system rests
in the fact that the majority of the metro cities face a major problem of traffic congestion. This could be avoided if the vehicles
having an on-board unit in it and have the capacity to inform to its nearest signal to divert the traffic and eliminate the
congestion problem. This system would also be useful in the case of handling the emergency conditions like accident and
vehicle theft. This should be further extended to provide a clear picture on the route that the ambulance should take to reach
the health care unit as soon as possible.
Index Terms- Algorithm, Energy-aware routing, Sensors, Traffic Congestion.

high level architecture of the proposed system. Section

IV describes the various phases associated with the
proposed system along with the complete functional
flow. Section V deals with the implementation of the
proposed system along with the result and
performance of the implementation carried out. This
deals with the discussion on the basic prototype that is
being implemented to showcase this proposed system.

I. INTRODUCTION
Traffic problems are the one of the major problems
that any metro cities in the world would face. Also the
main focus of the traffic management system is the
congestion avoidance. The congestion avoidance
helps in reducing and controlling the traffic of any
particular city. Traffic congestion involves in the
wasting of time of passengers. Delays due to traffic
congestion may result in late arrival for employment,
meetings, and education, resulting in lost business,
disciplinary action or other personal losses [3][4].
Inability to forecast the travel time accurately is
primarily due to traffic congestion. The main
disadvantage is the wasted fuel increasing pollution.
Wear and tear on vehicles thus making financial
losses to the owners due to constant replacement. The
blocked traffic may interfere with the passage of
emergency vehicles traveling to their destinations
where they are urgently needed. There is a higher
chance of collisions due to tight spacing and constant
stopping-and-going. Due to the ever-increasing traffic
demand, modern societies with well-planned road
management systems, and sufficient infrastructures
for transportation still face the problem of traffic
congestion. This results in loss of travel time, and
huge societal and economic costs. Constructing new
roads could be one of the solutions for handling the
traffic congestion problem, but it is often less feasible
due to political and environmental concerns. An
alternative would be to make more efficient use of the
existing infrastructure.

II.

EXISTING ENERGY EFFICIENT

ROUTING SYSTEM

The major findings in the existing system could be

summarized as follows,
The technique of the Hybrid Indirect Transmission
protocol (HIT) [6] uses a clustering technique to
transmit the packet to the uplink node. In case of the
sensor nodes where the energy is a major constraint
and the need for the mobility is almost nil due to
congestion along with the added fact that addition and
deletion of the new sensor nodes is almost
non-existent
It is non-existent due to non availability of apace in
traffic, the clustering mechanism each time consumes
a lot of energy and even if one time clustering could
determine the routing path based on the formed
clusters, knowing the neighbors of the network and
then clustering would be a redundant step in the
algorithm and would be more energy consuming. The
routing decision being static becomes an added
disadvantage to this system.
The technique of the Time zone coordinated Sleep
Scheduling algorithm [7] has the disadvantage of
supporting only single star topology. There is no
coordination of the sleeping nodes which creates the
new problem of hidden terminal. Thus any

Section II describes various existing routing protocols

in place describing their failures of being
energy-aware routing. The Section III describes the

Proceedings of IRF International Conference, 05th April-2014, Pondicherry, India, ISBN: 978-93-82702-71-9
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Congestion Avoidance System using Beacons for Traffic Management

improvements towards this technique would not lead

to be energy-aware protocols as extra energy has to be
spent for the identification of the hidden terminal
found before transmission of the medical data.
These existing system deals with the presence of the
existing system with an assumption of nil addition of

the new vehicles due to the traffic and the no

movement with respect to the position of the vehicles
due to the fact that these vehicles are stopped majorly
due to congestion. Thus the proposed system should be
fast and energy-efficient in terms of the congestion
information transfer.

Figure 1. High Level Architecture of the proposed model for congestion avoidance

determined dynamically. Thus this information

anyhow finally should reach the traffic signal and
thus it should avoid the further congestion in the
same path.
For all the neighboring nodes of the sensor, the
reserved energy level and the available energy
level is obtained during the response and during
the receipt of acknowledgement. Based on this, if
available energy level is greater than the reserved
energy level, then the node is declared active else
as passive node. This is done for all the sensor
nodes.

III. PROPOSED MODEL

Energy - Efficient Congestion Avoidance Technique.
This phase of the proposed model is the energy-aware
routing algorithm for the congestion information
transfer to the Traffic Signal nearby (TSig) by any of
the sensor nodes that are embodied in the vehicles
(Vehicular on-board unit). Node will have to
communicate with the TSig to have transferred
successfully the congestion data to divert the traffic.
For achieving the process, the information about the
neighbor must be known to all sensor nodes planted
achieved through the algorithm of update. The main
intention of this phase however is to communicate
amongst the sensor nodes in an energy-aware fashion.
Explanation of function Update (Routing_Table)
The information about the neighboring nodes are
requested and gathered in the sensor nodes as it is
believed that it is possible for a node to
communicate with its predefined neighbors by
definition of a pre-defined communication range
and the nodes are also stuck in the traffic. These
reasons attribute to those sensor planted are
capable of communicating with sensor and
probability of isolation of node (being node
connected) due to un-reachability becomes
negligible and happens only if they transfer in the
opposite direction. So the neighboring nodes are

The format of the acknowledgement and the

congestion data transfer message is predefined as in
figure 2. The request and the data format coincides
except the presence of data in the congestion data
transfer message and absence of the same in the
request message. It has the source node information
both the originator source node (from where the data
originated) and the immediate source node (to avoid
loops). The source node is list of the nodes, through
which data has traversed. In case of request message it
is only to the source node. It also has the source node
tag name from where the message comes from and the
information about the destination (any TSig nodes
named as TSig_id). One main assumption is that the
TSig is active all the time and is never changed. The

Proceedings of IRF International Conference, 05th April-2014, Pondicherry, India, ISBN: 978-93-82702-71-9
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Congestion Avoidance System using Beacons for Traffic Management

acknowledgement format is of the form which has the

node which sends the acknowledgement. It also has
the node which receives the same, the energy level of it
to be updated by the neighbor node. This avoids the
unnecessary wastage of latency for dedicating a time

period for the transfer of the energy related

information amongst nodes which also degrades the
energy level of each node for processing on the load of
requests and responses for update at a particular time
interval. This makes it more energy-aware.

Figure 2. Message - Request and Acknowledgement Structure

IV.

platform. This could be detailed using the following

figures. Fig. 3 explains an example use case scenario
for describing the algorithm in a detailed manner. The
main point here is the TSig energy is also saved by
communicating with only the node which is in the
shortest communication range.

PROPOSED ENERGY EFFICIENT

APPROACH

In the proposed system, the load is distributed and also

the update is made only at the right time (as the node
may lose energy at a large scale only during routing
rather than during idle period) and the heat associated
with processing of the load is avoided. The main
algorithm of energy-efficient routing is described
below in detail,
If the node connected to TSig is willing to transfer
the data, i.e., the sensor node ( node which has TSig as
neighbor can be called as the Master Node) has
congestion data to transfer, the transfer happens
directly. Else, if there is only one neighbor node then
transfer to that node. Else in the case for more than
one send it to an active node, if available with higher
energy level or passive node having higher available
energy than the other neighbors. Each time the node is
traversed, the list of source node traversed is added to
the list and in case of cycle, the node which identifies
that it is receiving the message for second time would
send it to a different neighbor. Thus it paves way to
avoid cycles.
If a different neighbor is unavailable without
rewriting the list it would send to the neighbor which
would see the cycle and do the same operation or send
to a different neighbor. As the nodes are well
connected to reach the other node either through
single or multi hop and possibility of un-reachability is
remote, the routing to master node happens in any
case. So the routing takes place until master is
reached.
The node having only the source as the only
neighbor from which it received the packet would be
treated in the same way a cycle is being treated. The
termination condition is if any node finds itself as the
Master after receiving the medical data would
acknowledge the previous node and communicate the
message to TSig, concluding the routing.

Use Case. The fig. 3 describes the various routing

parameters associated with particular sensor node. For
example it deals with the routing table of the node B
and the node D as the node D becomes the node with
which the TSig could be contacted. Energy aware path
in fig.3 is discussed as follows,
The main source nodes are S and I, the node waiting
for congestion data transfer. The node S selects E as it
is active node with highest available energy level and
the node E has no choice for active nodes. So it selects
the passive node B with highest available energy.
Finally B finds A active but does not send to A as it has
D with highest energy and end as D being the master
node.
In case D had lower energy level then the node
could have sent to A, to S again creating a cycle. This
could have been solved by S still choosing E, but not
rewriting the Source tag (as B is in cycle) and E
selecting B with no rewrite for the same reason and
finally B selecting node D instead of A to avoid cycle
and thus updating source list. If B has no neighbor
other than C, case of cycle would not have occurred.
For I to D routing path F is not chosen because it is
passive, thus being energy-aware.
Also the main advantage of the system rests in the
classification of the node based on their energy levels.
Thus this overcomes the small disadvantage of the
earlier systems that could arise when the node
transmits to neighbor with a higher energy levels or
range than preferring the node with a lower energy
levels or range. The node which is defined to be
neighbor based on the response and active is given
high importance and the probability of all neighbors
being passive, selecting a passive node at a higher
energy level range than active node at lesser range are
negligible.
All the heat generated due to the routing decision
taken by process of cluster analysis for neighbor nodes

V. IMPLEMENTATION AND RESULTS

The implementation of the entire system is done as a
simulation using the Java programming language

Proceedings of IRF International Conference, 05th April-2014, Pondicherry, India, ISBN: 978-93-82702-71-9
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Congestion Avoidance System using Beacons for Traffic Management

and path selection is avoided as the active neighbor

with higher available energy is directly selected and
sent verifying the source tag for cycle. Thus becomes
energy-efficient and the update on change in energy
level is added to the acknowledgement packet received

and thus making the wastage of latency completely

avoided. Thus these factors add to the advantage of the
proposed system making it both energy-aware and
energy-efficient in terms of utilization.

Figure 3. Use Case Scenario

VI. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

Results. The simulation is done in java programming
platform and the fig 4 shows the current status of the
communication status with the TSig.

Figure 5. Simulation Path Chosen - Time Taken 1.485 Secs

Figure 6. Use Case Example - Energy Efficient Routing.

CONCLUSION
Figure 4. Simulation Results

The main intention of the proposed energy-efficient

routing technique is the entire process should not be
always controlled and coordinated in a centralized
fashion with a network coordinator. This paper

The node A connected to it is active and the node now

could act as the master node for further
communication. This is the Master Node at present.

Proceedings of IRF International Conference, 05th April-2014, Pondicherry, India, ISBN: 978-93-82702-71-9
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Congestion Avoidance System using Beacons for Traffic Management

[2]. Ruzzelli, A. G., Jurdak, R., O'Hare, G. M., & Van Der Stok, P.,
Energy-efficient multi-hop medical sensor networking, In
Proc of the 1st ACM SIGMOBILE international workshop on
Systems and networking support for healthcare and assisted
living environments pp. 37-42, June 2007.

determines dynamically the neighbors and thus

performs the algorithm in an energy-aware fashion.
The energy-efficient routing path identification in a
power-aware technique is the main achievement along
with intimation to the signals about congestion and
thus helping in congestion removal.

[3]. L. D. Baskar, B. De Schutter, and J. Hellendoorn. Dynamic

speed limits and on-ramp metering for IVHS using model
predictive control. In Proceedings of the 11th International
IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC
2008), pages 821826, Beijing, China, October 2008.

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[1]. Culpepper, B. J., Dung, L., & Moh, M., Design and analysis of
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Proceedings of IRF International Conference, 05th April-2014, Pondicherry, India, ISBN: 978-93-82702-71-9
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