On evacuation assisting vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Recent natural and man-made disasters such as Sandy (2012) and Fukushima nuclear power plant (2011) make efficient evacuation route planning and routing more important than ever. Conventional sign-based evacuation route and its information are limited to use in a life-threatening environment. In this paper, we first investigate a least travel time based shortest path approach to minimize the evacuation time in a Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET). Since the travel time changes in the presence of time-varying traffic congestions, frequent and timely updates of the shorted path during the evacuation period are essential. Thus, we also investigate the evacuation assisting VANET to efficiently update the shortest path on wheel by deploying vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. Then we propose VANET assisting schemes, V2RSU and V2RSU+V2V. We also implement the shortest path based schemes to work in VANETs, Upperbound and W/O Update. We compare the performance of four schemes as a function of network size and number of vehicles, sources, destinations, and congestions. The simulation results indicate that the proposed schemes integrated with a VANET can reduce the evacuation time significantly.