An Intelligent Transportation System Application for Smartphones Based on Vehicle Position Advertising and Route Sharing in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Alerting drivers about incoming emergency vehicles and their routes can greatly improve their travel time in congested cities, while reducing the risk of accidents due to distractions. This paper contributes to this goal by proposing Messiah, an Android application capable of informing regular vehicles about incoming emergency vehicles like ambulances, police cars and fire brigades. This is made possible by creating a network of vehicles capable of directly communicating between them. The user can, therefore, take driving decisions in a timely manner by considering incoming alerts. Using the support of our GRCBox hardware, the application can rely on vehicular ad-hoc network communications in the 5 GHz band, being V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) communication provided through a combination of Android-based smartphone and our GRCBox device. The application was tested in three different scenarios with different levels of obstruction, showing that it is capable of providing alerts up to 300 meters, and notifying vehicles within less than one second.