Targeted Dissemination of Emergency Information: Joint Traffic and Communication Optimization

The travel delay caused by incidents severely reduces the efficiency of traffic. This symptom has been relieved with the development of advanced communication technologies. However, the emergency traffic information (ETI) is meaningless for vehicles which do not traverse the incident segment. Unlike most existing studies concentrating on the network performance during the dissemination of ETI to all vehicles, this paper proposes a joint traffic-communication optimization strategy (JTCS) to reduce the extra cost caused by unnecessary communication, which minimizes the total communication and traffic cost by transmitting the ETI to the worthy vehicles who need the ETI. Specifically, we capture the optimal targeted ETI transmission strategy with combination of radio resource allocation strategy (RRAS) and traffic-influencing transmission strategy (TTS), which can be converted into a bi-level optimization problem. The lower-level problem minimizes the total cost by Lagrangian method and obtains the optimal RRAS when the TTS is given. The upper-level problem develops the optimal TTS based on the optimal RRAS obtained in the lower-level problem. Simulation results using SUMO and MATLAB indicate that JTCS can achieve minimal total cost of ETI transmission and vehicle rerouting by comparing with existing approaches.