Opportunistic dissemination of emergency messages using VANET on urban roads

Catastrophes, such as fire accidents, road crashes and other life threatening emergencies occuring at an increasing pace in urban areas, anticipate timely arrival of the emergency rescue services. Most of such emergencies arise from urban roads which are characterised by high density of vehicles. This paper presents an approach for disseminating the emergency messages and reporting the event to hospitals, police stations, fire stations, paramedics etc., using the existing infrastructures of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) with minimum notification delay. In the proposed system, end-to-end delay is reduced by minimizing the propagation delay as a two-stage process. In the first stage, forwarding a subset comprising of vehicles moving towards the emergency resource is estimated. In the second stage, an innovative method for choosing the shortest path among the feasible routing channels is introduced. A prototype of the proposed system has been tested under simulated traffic for an urban road map and observed that the delay is adequate for accident relief applications.