DisTraC: A Distributed and LowOverhead Protocol for Traffic Congestion Control Using Vehicular Networks The increase in traffic congestion in big cities causes negative impacts on several areas, such as health and the economy. One of the main alternatives to reduce traffic jams are Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that use technologies such as inductive loops, Global Positioning System (GPS), and wireless communication. The vehicular networks enable the wireless communication in the vehicular environment. This communication may occur from Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) or from Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I). However, the installation and maintenance of the infrastructures necessary to cover urban areas may have high costs. Therefore, this work presents a new Distributed and lowoverhead protocol for Traffic Congestion control (DisTraC) based on V2V communication. The protocol aims to reduce the average travel time of vehicles ensuring a low communication overhead. Simulations results shown that DisTraC outperforms other studies found in the literature in terms of communication overhead and is more efficient in reducing traffic congestion.

Evaluation and optimization of Decentralized Congestion Control Algorithms for Vehicular Networks Nowadays, road traffic management is becoming a major challenge for realistic society. As a result, reliable communication between vehicles is the key point to this challenge. Currently, IEEE802.11p which is considered as de facto standard for road communication is designed to solve this challenge. However, the communication channel medium is still expected to get congested when a large number of vehicles exist. Target to solve this, European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) has standardized a set of Decentralized Congestion Control (DCC) mechanisms to control channel load. One of the main topics is achieving channel load control to guarantee reliable communication for platooning systems. In this paper, we focus on investigating on DCC reactive control approaches, aiming to provide comprehensive insights of how DCC framework transmission parameters, i.e. message generation rate, transmission power and data rate, will impact the stability of platooning systems. Besides, for each instance of the transmission parameter, we target to optimize the parameter and propose more stable control algorithms by running repetitive simulations.