COLOMBO: Investigating the potential of V2X for traffic management purposes assuming low penetration rates

After the Vehicular Communication (V2X) technology roll out in 2015, the number of equipped vehicles is assumed to increase slowly. While many Day One V2X applications are related to traffic safety and require a high penetration rate and communication reliability, traffic management applications could still benefit from even few equipped vehicles. Considering local V2X-based traffic surveillance based on a low rate of V2X technology, traffic light control could dynamically adapt priorities depending on traffic flows and volumes. In order to mitigate the low rate of V2X technology, already deployed solutions for wireless ad-hoc communications, such as WiFi-direct, available on most smartphones (often on-board of regular vehicles), should be investigated and exploited as complementary source of information, with full awareness of their strong reliability and performance limitations. The COLOMBO project, which is co-funded by the European Commission and presented within this report, focuses on such use of information either from a small subset of V2X-equipped vehicles only, or complementary to other wireless ad-hoc technologies and tries to exploit this information for traffic surveillance and an adaptive, optimized control of traffic lights.