Road Reservation for Fast and Safe Emergency Vehicle Response Using Ubiquitous Sensor Network

Transportation has been playing important role in our society by providing mobility for people, freight, and information. However, it cuts its own throat by causing car accidents and, traffic congestion, and air pollution. The main cause of these problems is a noticeable growth in the number of vehicles. The easiest way is to build new road infrastructures unless resources such as time, money, and space are limited. Therefore, there is a need to manage the existing road infrastructures effectively and safely. In this paper, we propose a road reservation scheme that provides fast and safe response for emergency vehicles using ubiquitous sensor network. Our idea is to allow emergency vehicles to reserve a road on a freeway for arriving to the scene of the accident quickly and safely. We also evaluate the performance by three reservation methods (No, Hop, and Full) to show that emergency vehicles such as ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars can rapidly and safely reach their destination. Simulation results show that the average speed of road reservation is about 1.09 ~ 1.20 times faster than that of non-reservation at various flow rates. However, road reservation should consider the speed of the emergency vehicle and the road density of the emergency vehicle processing direction, as a result of Hop Reservation and Full Reservation performance comparison analysis. We confirm that road reservation can guarantee safety driving of emergency vehicles without reducing their speed and help to mitigate traffic congestion.