A Centralized Traffic Control Mechanism for Evacuation of Emergency Vehicles Using the DSRC Protocol

Abstract

Emergency service vehicles need safety and fluent paths to save time. In this paper, a centralized traffic control mechanism is proposed for the evacuation of vehicles that drive toward the dedicated path of the emergency vehicles (EV), e.g. ambulance, fire engines, police cars, etc, using the dedicated short range communications (DSRC) protocol. In our proposed mechanism, a centralized server is used to monitor and control all traffic information to support real time traffic information and services for emergency vehicles, and the centralized server also calculates the shortest path for emergency vehicles to pass by. If the approaching information of emergency vehicles is not announced in advance to other vehicles that will obstruct the approaching path of emergency vehicles, it will cause the traffic muddle on the road and increase the delayed time for emergency vehicles. Thus, we also propose a data dissemination scheme to transmit the warning messages to other vehicles that will obstruct the approaching road of emergency vehicles. In our experiment, we will exhibit the performance of our proposed system.