Public Safety Application for Approaching Emergency Vehicle Alert and Accident Reporting in VANETs Using WAVE

Today's transport system has evolved from horse driven carriages and paved roads to a more complex road transport system made up of a variety of vehicles and other infrastructure, all put in place in order to support safe and efficient mobility of vehicles. The next step to further improve the transportation system of today is to make the vehicles and roadside infrastructure more intelligent by making them communicate with each other. This new ability will help find new solutions to current problems like traffic congestion, vehicular collisions, monitoring of adherence to traffic rules and alerting the drivers of hazardous conditions. Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to road side infrastructure networks which make this possible by providing support to numerous applications aimed towards improving safety and driving experience on the road. A Public Safety VANET application adhering to the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) standard and requirements laid down by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was designed, implemented, simulated and tested over a scalable open-sourced test bed aimed towards simulating a complete Intelligent Transportation System consisting of various applications operating together. The application supports two features: Approaching Emergency Vehicle Alert: An Approaching Public Safety Vehicle (Police/Fire/EMS) in a state of emergency will alert the vehicles in its path using the VANET, causing them to give way. Post-Crash Warning: A vehicle involved in a crash will immediately alert approaching vehicles about its current state using the VANET, helping them come to a halt at a safe distance, hence avoiding pileups. The performance and adherence to the requirements was analyzed, and a demonstration of the system was prepared to showcase the application in action.