Opportunistic dissemination for accident management using vehicular networks

Abstract

While handling catastrophes like fire accidents, road crashes and other life threatening emergencies, delivery time is very important. This paper presents a novel routing approach for speedy accident recovery using Vehicular AdHoc Networks (VANETs). The accident is reported to hospitals, police stations, fire stations, paramedics etc. with minimum notification delay. In the proposed system, end-to- end delay is reduced by minimizing the propagation delay in two stages. In the first stage, the directionality of the vehicles is estimated. In the second stage, an innovative method of choosing the shortest path among the feasible routing channels is introduced. Other preferences of using vehicular networks for accident management are unlimited power source, low cost communication and the availability of location information. The proposed system was tested under simulated traffic of an urban road map. It is observed that the delay is adequate for accident relief applications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.