A method of securing priority-use routes for emergency vehicles using inter-vehicle and vehicle-road communication

The number of emergency calls is growing year by year, owing to an increase in the number of accidents, fires and disasters. Consequently, the number of dispatches of emergency vehicles (police cars, ambulances and fire engines) is on the rise. This paper proposes a method of reducing the amount of time needed for emergency vehicles to travel to their destinations (travel time) by enabling these vehicles to run on the road with high priority. This is achieved by making emergency vehicles and road side units send messages that notify other vehicles of the routes that will be taken by the emergency vehicles via a VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork). We have developed a simulation system to evaluate the proposed method in terms of the average travel time. Two different radio propagation models were used. The evaluation results support the effectiveness of the proposed method.