Traffic congestion increases CO2 emissions, fuel consumption and travel times. These increases are related to the evolution of the growth in urban areas. Urban areas are being transforming into smart cities, that is, they use massive Infrastructure and Communication Technologies (ICT) to improve all the services with which citizens are provided. One objective of smart cities is to reduce traffic congestion. One approach to reaching this complex objective is by using Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) to reroute vehicles in cities or in their peri-urban areas. Although, rerouting is a complex task, ICT have evolved a lot and they are currently being applied to the development of more powerful ITS. New ITS cooperative systems are commonly denoted as combinations of X2X (with X = I and/or X = V). In this paper, a new smart system based on I2V communications for peri-urban areas is described and implemented with the overall goal of improving rerouting, which implies reducing congestion. A demonstrator has been developed to evaluate the architecture and the impact that the use of public and up-to-date traffic information can have on rerouting. A real model of the peri-urban area of Castellon de la Plana has been used to evaluate the architecture. Using this model, several tests have been performed. Results show that traffic status information is valuable, but its impact on rerouting depends on the number of drivers that use this information appropriately.
