A fast information dissemination system for emergency services over vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Presently, emergency vehicles use lights and sirens to alert road users of their approach and presence. Unfortunately, pedestrians and vehicle drivers may react too late or in a wrong way and increase emergency vehicle response times and collisions caused by these emergency vehicles. This paper presents an information dissemination system to clearly report the arrival and destination directions of the emergency vehicle to road users to reduce collisions and response times of emergency vehicles. The proposed information dissemination system is based on a new MAC protocol named Frequency and Distance based Priority MAC (FDP-MAC) to send the emergency messages to the traffic management center and other vehicles with lesser delay. The proposed system is simulated in NS-2. The proposed MAC prioritizes and delivers packets according to their service type and distance between the vehicle and intersection. The performance of the proposed MAC is analyzed and compared with the standard IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11p MAC. The results show that the FDP-MAC delivers the emergency messages faster than IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11p. Moreover, this work will help the effective dissemination of information, management of emergency vehicles and help reduce their response time as well as number of potential collisions.