Recently, researchers have been active in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) development, especially connecting vehicles each other using the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). Among the multitude of applications that allow these connected vehicles, a specific attention has been given to traffic flow control and safety purposes. For the emergency vehicles such as ambulances or fire-trucks, to save time by arriving to the destination earlier often means to save lives. For vehicles of such critical purposes, even a gain of a few seconds can be significant. In this research, in the first part we introduce the context of the research, show motivations for the wireless-aided systems, and state the goal of the research. In the second part, we present the current vehicular wireless technology, and introduce ITS applications examples. In the third part, we propose a new ITS application based on a new approach to reduce the time to reach destination of the emergency vehicles, by controlling the traffic, providing information and directions to the drivers surrounding the emergency vehicle, using wireless vehicular communication. We also present a technology alternative to the IEEE 802.11p protocol using the 3G network, quicker to deploy. In the fourth part, we propose an environment to evaluate our application. As the wireless technology is not prevalent yet, we evaluate the benefits of the system depending on the penetration percentage of the wireless technology. We evaluate the system in two scenarios: a highway and a city. In the fifth part, we show that in both cases, the system helps the emergency vehicle to reach its destination faster, especially when more than 60% of the vehicles have the system. We show that thanks to the application, the emergency vehicle can reach its destination at almost the optimal time (when there are no cars in the streets). Finally, we conclude and discuss about the further researches possibilities.
|