UAV-Based Intelligent Transportation System for Emergency Reporting in Coverage Holes of Wireless Networks

Abstract

During critical moments, disaster and accident victims may not be able to request help from the emergency response center. This may happen when the victim’s vehicle is located within a coverage hole in a wireless network. In this paper, we adopt an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to work as an automatic emergency dispatcher for a user in a vehicle facing a critical condition. Given that the UAV is located within a coverage hole and a predetermined critical condition is detected, the UAV becomes airborne and dispatches distress messages to a communication network. We propose to use a path loss map for UAV trajectory design, and we formulate our problem mathematically as an Integer Linear Program (ILP). Our goals are to minimize the distress messages delivery time and the UAV’s mission completion time. Due to the difficulty of obtaining the optimal solution when the scale of the problem is large, we proposed an efficient algorithm that reduces the computational time significantly. We simulate our problem under different scenarios and settings, and study the performance of our proposed algorithm.

Every Second Counts: A Comprehensive Review of Route Optimization and Priority Control for Urban Emergency Vehicles

“…Additionally, several studies explored novel approaches to monitor traffic conditions, using UAVs to improve EMV-TTP accuracy during abnormal scenarios such as earthquakes [43][44][45][46]. During natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes, traffic facilities like detectors, geomagnetic coils, and other roadside units can be damaged by power outages, making it difficult to detect congestion or accidents along the rescue route [47]. Under these scenarios, UAVs are immune to road disruptions and traffic congestion and aid in monitoring emergency events and providing real-time feedback about traffic conditions beyond direct line of sight (e.g., congestion, accidents), helping to reduce response times [43,48].…”