A Feasibility Study of Privacy Ensuring Emergency Vehicle Approaching Warning System

Abstract

With the deployment of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), new transport safety and efficiency applications are emerging. One of the fields where the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) is expected to bring great benefits, is emergency systems. A properly designed emergency vehicle warning system should provide car drivers with adequate reaction times and additional information, complementing the currently used lights and sirens. The objective is to increase road safety and to create conditions for a fast and reliable movement of emergency vehicles (EVs). The available literature addressing privacy issues in VANET-based emergency vehicle warning systems is strongly limited. In this paper, the privacy ensuring emergency vehicle approaching warning system (PEEV-WS) is proposed based on a requirements analysis. Privacy is ensured by avoiding transmissions of sensitive information (e.g., expected EV route) over the wireless channel. This is achieved by assigning the decision-making responsibility to an EV and determining which vehicles can potentially interfere with the EV in the near future, and to notify those vehicles only by unicasting vehicle-customized information. The performance of the system is evaluated by federated telco-traffic simulations in terms of end-to-end delay and message delivery probability for three commonly used ad hoc routing protocols—Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR), and Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO), as well as in terms of reaction time, which the system provides to the drivers. Despite low applicability of the ad hoc routing protocols for vehicular communication, especially for low-latency and high-frequency applications, the simulations of the communication network demonstrate that the AODV protocol, with the modified configuration, can support the emergency vehicle warning system. The traffic simulations confirm that the system has the potential to provide drivers with sufficient reaction time.