PV-Alert: A fog-based architecture for safeguarding vulnerable road users

High volumes of pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users (VRUs) have much higher casualty rates per mile; not surprising given their lack of protection from an accident. In order to alleviate the problem, sensing capabilities of smartphones can be used to detect, warn and safeguard these road users. In this research we propose an infrastructure-less fog-based architecture named PV-Alert (Pedestrian-Vehicle Alert) where fog nodes process delay sensitive data obtained from smartphones for alerting pedestrians and drivers before sending the data to the cloud for further analysis. Fog computing is considered in developing the architecture since it is an emerging paradigm that has paramount of advantages for low-latency applications which demand mobility support, geo-distribution and location awareness. We have also defined an algorithm for accident prediction and alerting traffic accidents involving vehicles and pedestrians. PV-Alert can be deployed quickly since it is based only on users' smartphones and doesn't require special infrastructure. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture is able to render alerts in real time whichever the wireless communication technology used to connect smartphones with fog nodes (Wi-Fi or LTE). Moreover, analytical and performance evaluations depict that the new architecture outperforms other related architectures in terms of reliability, scalability and latency.