Cooperative Bargain for the Autonomous Separation of Traffic Flows in Smart Reversible Lanes

Spacer bars in the smart reversible lanes make periodically broadcast of messages to share their local observed traffic information with each other. This aims to help other spacer bars acquire the global traffic information and make consistent movement when separating the flows. However, radio interference and vehicles in the traffic may degrade the qualities of wireless communication links and cause frequent message losses in the broadcast. Existing solutions tend to use data forwarding to enhance the message dissemination, which may cause imbalanced load in the spacer bars. For instance, the nodes close to the sink have to forward more messages, whereas the ones far away from the sink have fewer messages for forwarding. The unbalanced distribution of network load has a high risk of blocking the wireless communication links and yield inconsistent movement in the reversible lanes. In this paper, we propose a Cooperative Bargain (CoB) scheme where each spacer bar carries some received messages to help other spacer bars recover their lost messages. Since the spacer bars can only acquire the local information, we formulate a cooperative bargain game to negotiate how to allocate the task of message recovery with a balanced network load until a consensus is achieved. CoB is evaluated with the real-world Wi-Fi communication traces in Isti/rural. Simulation results show that CoB can recover an average of 98.6% messages within 100 milliseconds in a 50-node network. CoB does not require the global network information but it can still achieve a comparable performance to other broadcast schemes.