Congestion-Aware Indoor Emergency Navigation Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

A typical application of wireless sensor networks is navigation for emergency evacuation whose goal is to guide people escaping from hazardous areas safely and quickly. In practical scenarios, the evacuating time depends not only on the length of the path but also on the congestion degree. However, as far as we know, the state of art fails to quantify congestion degree accurately in evacuation process. In this paper, we propose a novel congestion-aware navigation algorithm which has several key advantages: First, we use the concept of moving speed to evaluate the congestion degree to accurately estimate the evacuating time. Second, we avoid the frequent in-situ interactions between users and the navigation system by using the sensors at intersections for displaying the escape directions. Third, our algorithm can reduce the direction oscillations due to the network communication delay and adapt to the variation of hazardous regions. We evaluate our algorithm by simulations under various realistic settings. Simulation results show that our algorithm has the shorter evacuating time and fewer oscillations than state-of-the-art work.