Traffic management is an old and growing problem within cities with inefficient road use resulting
in significant economic costs. Existing traffic management solutions are typically large
centralised systems which rely on central authorities for control. Furthermore, these systems are
costly to setup, deploy and maintain. Within the near future it is expected that Vehicle-to-X
(V2X) technologies will become integrated into both vehicles and transportation infrastructures.
V2X technologies allow vehicles and road-side infrastructure to communicate with one
another using ad-hoc wireless communications.
In this thesis we present a unique vehicular framework for the development and prototyping
of decentralised vehicular services which exploit available V2X technologies. The framework
uses discrete event simulation to evaluate the operation of a decentralised vehicular service. The
decentralised services presented within the thesis are unique as they require a combination of
scaled ad-hoc inter-vehicle messaging, mobility data and cooperation to enable communities of
road vehicles to provide services to one another. Vehicles manage themselves in their local space
to approximate the outcomes of centralised services. As vehicular services are decentralised
they reduce the costs associated with deploying and supporting traffic services.
Using the framework we prototype two novel decentralised traffic control protocols which
evaluate the problems of travel time estimation and intersection control. Each protocol is
evaluated in a scaled scenario which emphasises the usage and requirement of fine grained
geographic mobility traces which mimic real city road maps. We show that decentralised
approaches provide a feasible means of providing vehicular services to users. We evaluate the
trade-offs and performance issues resulting from their use.