Accident Management System using Fog Computing

Emergency management systems are being developed using innovative technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, cloud and fog computing. These new technologies help to save response time from authorities in crucial situations. Shorter response times can save many lives during accidents and other emergency situation. In most of the accident management systems, cloud services are used to get information and notifying the emergency managing authorities such as hospital, ambulance personnel and police. Although, cloud servers can have detailed information needed in such situations, some times there can be connectivity and information travel time problems. These issues can be fatal in emergency situations where quick and prompt response is generally required. A new networking paradigm of fog/edge computing enables communicating devices near the emergency/accident place to form a network and share the information. In this paper, we propose such an Accident Management System using Fog/Edge Computing (AMFC) that takes advantage of this new networking paradigm in order to provide faster response time. The proposed system has three layer architecture, where most of the communication happens among IoT devices under the fog layer and they only communicate to cloud when required information is not available locally near the devices. We evaluate performance of the proposed system under different network configuration scenarios and found that there is considerable improvement in response time and network usage compared to the system where only cloud services are available.