Abstract
Survival of a patient depends on effective data communication in healthcare system. In this paper, an emergency routing protocol for Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is proposed to quickly forward the current patient status information from the ambulance to the hospital to provide pre-medical treatment. As the ambulance takes time to reach the hospital, ambulance doctor can provide sudden treatment to the patient in emergency by sending patient status information to the hospital through the vehicles using vehicular communication. Secondly, the experienced doctors respond to the information by quickly sending a treatment information to the ambulance. In this protocol, data is forwarded through that path which has less link breakage problem between the vehicles. This is done by calculating an intersection value Ivalue for the neighboring intersections by using the current traffic information. Then the data is forwarded through that intersection which has minimum Ivalue. Simulation results show VehiHealth performs better than PGEDIR, GyTAR, A-STAR and GSR routing protocols in terms of average end-to-end delay, number of link breakage, path length, and average response time.
Introduction
VANET is an advanced wireless communication technology in which vehicles communicate to transfer important infomation [1–4]. This is mainly used to reduce the accidents on the roads by sending emergency messages to the vehicles. In VANET system, each vehicle can send, receive, store, and compute the information. VANET provide many types of applications like internet access, media downloading, safety systems, etc. Many car producing companies like BMW, Daimler, Ford, etc. uses the VANET technology to provide Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications to the users [5–9]. It is mainly implemented in Europe, USA and Japan by using standards like DSRC with 75 MHz spectrum and 5.9 GHz of radio frequency [10, 11]. Figure 1 shows the architecture of VANET in which the vehicles use vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to Road Side Unit (RSU) and RSU to vehicle communication. RSU is a static unit which acts as a router to connect the vehicles with the server.
Conclusion
VehiHealth promises a better routing protocol to support healthcare system by providing pre-medical treatment to the patients in emergency situation. It is a cost effective routing solution where the data is send to the destination free of cost by using ad hoc communication. To forward the data, intersections are selected by finding Ivalue of the neighboring intersections. The minimum Ivalue intersection is selected as the next intersection through which the data is forwarded. This method reduces the end-to-end delay by predicting the connectivity of the road. So, the path which is highly connected and takes minimum delay is selected as the next path. This method supports the medical system by attaining faster data exchanges between the ambulance and hospital. From the simulation results, it is observed that VehiHealth performs well from morning hour 6:00 AM (morning) to 00:00 AM (midnight). However, after midnight to 6:00 AM its performance reduces and the end-to-end delay is high due to few or no vehicles between the junctions. In future, we will focus on the data communication between the ambulance and hospital at midnight and early morning time using wireless communication technology.
