Simulating the traffic effects of vehicle-to-vehicle messaging systems

Numerous applications of car-to-car communication (C2C) are currently believed to have great potential to improve traffic safety, comfort and throughput. However, the effects that are hoped for, have not yet been clearly analyzed. This article describes our work to quantify the possible benefits of car-to-car communication. The means we are using is a combined traffic and network simulation environment where driver information received via C2C communication has an effect on route decisions. We describe the requirements on such a coupled simulation environment, possible ways to realize it and provide some early results of our approach to quantify the traffic effect of hazard messaging. Road traffic, the wireless Ad hoc communication and the application logic must be separately taken into account to analyze the impacts of C2C on traffic flow.