An Adaptive Guiding Protocol for Crowd Evacuation Based on Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in many applications. One of them is indoor guiding service for emergency evacuation whose goal is to assist moving objects in escaping a hazardous region safely and quickly when an emergency occurs. In this paper, we propose a distributed and adaptive guiding protocol that takes several factors such as hazardous regions, distance to exits, width of exits, and congestion degree of each location into consideration. This protocol guides moving objects with load balancing among multiple navigation paths to multiple exits and avoids congestion to reduce the evacuation time. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol can guide moving objects (e.g., people) to exits in shorter time and have higher survival rate in comparison to those without balancing the traffic load on navigation paths and exits.