Contents I. Introduction
Efficient and green transportation is a key enabler of smart cities which will revolutionise our lives in the near future. Indeed, achieving faster and smarter mobility of people and goods in and around cities depends on the sophistication level of traffic congestion mitigation techniques as well as the advancement of the deployed road infrastructure [1] . Nowadays, congested traffic is the root cause of a number of problems such as air pollution and the excessive use of fossil fuel. In [2] , the authors state that “the fuel consumed by vehicles stopping and idling accounts for approximately 40% of network wide vehicular fuel consumption Their research work has solved this issue by developing an intelligent system that would better handle the operations of the traffic lights to avoid idle vehicles on the roads. This is achieved using a series of sensors deployed around traffic lights to sense and report the presence or absence of cars waiting to go through. This data would then be processed and used to enhance the fluidity of the traffic at the crossing. As this paper was written in 2007, it misses out on an important feature of current and future road traffic, i.e., autonomous vehicles. This breakthrough technology could lead to a more efficient intelligent traffic system capable of interacting with the cars at any point on the road.
