Short-Term Traffic Prediction for Edge Computing-Enhanced Autonomous and Connected Cars

Autonomous and connected cars (ACCs), together with edge computing (EC), have been recognized as a promising solution to achieve green intelligent transportation for smart cities. This paper aims to address short-term traffic prediction, a fundamental enabler for the success of ACC applications, under the European Telecommunications Standards Institute multi-access EC (MEC) architecture that exhibits constraints different from conventional cloud computing. First, a data-centric experiment platform is designed and implemented to facilitate traffic prediction algorithm development. This paper further proposes a novel short-term traffic prediction model that integrates a traffic light model and a vehicle velocity model, considering limited computing resources of MEC servers. We note that the effects of traffic lights are complicated and have not been rigorously examined in most, if not all, of the related work. This work models the queueing time when a driver arrives at a road intersection and faces a red light. Moreover, to forecast the vehicle velocity, we propose a novel low-complexity semiparametric prediction model considering periodic features and spatial/temporal correlations of dynamic road events. The experiment results demonstrate that our vehicle-velocity prediction model achieves almost equivalent accuracy to the well-known Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network model, requiring much lower computational complexity. Our experiment results also confirm that since our integrated model pays attention to the traffic-light effects and the individual driver behavior, it can more effectively capture the real-time changes of traffic conditions.