A WSN-based approach for prioritising emergency vehicles : Performance analysis of medium access control

The advancement of mobile communication, data acquisition and analysis technologies has allowed their integration in multiple application domains. Similarly, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been increasingly integrated into intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to improve the quality and the effectiveness of proposed services. In this paper, we design a WSN-based ITS application in which vehicles are considered as mobile nodes. Indeed, this application aims to prioritise critical service vehicles (CSV) such as ambulance, fire truck, police car, etc. by managing road traffic flows dynamically. Our main goal through this work is to analyse the medium access control (MAC) in the context of this application by considering variations in speed and number of mobile nodes as well as other important criteria, and therefore, judging the suitability of some existing MAC protocols for such high dynamic context.