A Survey and Taxonomy of Urban Traffic Management: Towards Vehicular Networks

Urban Traffic Management (UTM) topics have been tackled since long time, mainly by civil engineers and by city planners. The introduction of new communication technologies — such as cellular systems, satellite positioning systems and inter-vehicle communications — has significantly changed the way researchers deal with UTM issues. In this survey, we provide a review and a classification of how UTM has been addressed in the literature. We start from the recent achievements of “classical” approaches to urban traffic estimation and optimization, including methods based on the analysis of data collected by fixed sensors (e.g., cameras and radars), as well as methods based on information provided by mobile phones, such as Floating Car Data (FCD). Afterwards, we discuss urban traffic optimization, presenting the most recent works on traffic signal control and vehicle routing control. Then, after recalling the main concepts of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we classify the different VANET-based approaches to UTM, according to three categories (“pure” VANETs, hybrid vehicular-sensor networks and hybrid vehicular-cellular networks), while illustrating the major research issues for each of them. The main objective of this survey is to provide a comprehensive view on UTM to researchers with focus on VANETs, in order to pave the way for the design and development of novel techniques for mitigating urban traffic problems, based on inter-vehicle communications.