Edge-based V2X Efficient Traffic Emergency Responding Protocol

Abstract

Traffic accidents considerably hinder transportation in urban centres, bringing high socio-economic costs. More importantly, an accident can severely compromise the health and lives of individuals. Minimizing the access time of an emergency response vehicle (ERV) to an accident site reduces damages, losses, and costs considerably. Traffic management systems (TMS) solutions ease the traffic congestion levels through recommended alternative re-routed paths. However, even though TMS might positively and indirectly aid ERV access, there is no focus on efficiently reducing ERV access time. Thus, a VANET-based approach is proposed to facilitate the timely arrival of an ERV to a destination. The approach uses multi-hop, ad-hoc messages between ordinary connected vehicles, the network edge, and ERVs to communicate details on an accident and coordinate a response. Results show that accident resolution can outperform congestion mitigation methods and demonstrate that ERV selection based on proximity reduces response time.