An IoT Enabled Traffic Light Controllers Synchronization Method for Road Traffic Congestion Mitigation

Road traffic congestion is among the most challenging issues of the 21^st century due to its devastating impact on the environment, the economy and the population health. To support the ongoing efforts in efficiently dealing with this issue we leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) sensing capabilities and develop an original synchronisation method to efficiently adapt traffic light phases in a way that significantly reduce urban road traffic congestion. We particularly focus on reducing congestion in city centres during afternoon peak hours where most drivers travel using arterial roads to exit the city centre to reach their homes. We achieved this by designing a novel Traffic Lights Controller (TLC) synchronization system that allows vehicles leaving the city centre to travel a long distance without stopping (i.e., minimizing the number of occurrence of 'stop and go' phenomenon). The performance evaluation results of our method using the microscopic road traffic simulator SUMO reveal that it achieves a reduction of up to 39% in the average travel time compared to non-synchronized fixed time TLCs.