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With the improvement in transportation infrastructure and in-vehicle technology in addition to a meteoric increase in the total number of commercial and non-commercial vehicles on the road, traffic accidents may occur, which usually cause a high death toll. More than half of these deaths occur due to a delayed response by medical care providers and rescue authorities. The chances of survival of an accident victim could increase drastically if immediate medical assistance is provided at an accident location. This work proposes a low-cost accident detection and notification system, which utilizes a multi-tier IoT-based vehicular environment; principally, it uses V2X Communication and Edge/Cloud computing. In this work, vehicles are equipped with an On-Board Unit (OBU) in addition to mechanical sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope) for reliable accident detection along with a Global Positioning System (GPS) module for identification of accident location. In addition to this, a camera module is implanted on the vehicle to capture the moment when an accident takes place. In order to facilitate inter-vehicle communication (IVC), OBU in each vehicle incorporates a wireless networking interface. Once an accident occurs, a vehicle detects it and generates an alert message. It then sends the message along with the accident location to an intermediate device, placed at the edge of the vehicular network, and therefore called an edge device. Upon receiving the notification, this edge device finds the nearest hospital and makes a request for an ambulance to be dispatched immediately. It also performs some preprocessing of data and effectively acts as a bridge between the sensors installed inside the vehicle and the distant server deployed in the cloud. A significant issue that the traffic authorities are currently facing is the real-time visualization of data obtained through such environments. Wireless interfaces are usually capable of forwarding real-time sensor data; however, this feature is not yet commercially available in the OBU of the vehicle; therefore, practical implementation is carried out using the Internet of things (IoT) in order to create a network among the vehicles, the edge node, and the central server. By performing analysis on the adequate acquired data of road accidents, the constructive plans of action can be devised that may limit the death toll. In order to assist the relevant authorities in performing wholesome analysis of refined and reliable data, a dynamic front-end visualization is proposed, which is hosted in the cloud. The generated charts and graphs help the personnel at relevant organizations to make appropriate decisions based on the conclusive analysis of processed and stored data.

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Natural disasters and catastrophes not only cost the loss of human lives, but adversely affect the progress toward sustainable development of the country. As soon as disaster strikes, the first and foremost challenge for the concerned authorities is to make an expeditious response. Consequently, they need to be highly-organized, properly-trained, and sufficiently-equipped to effectively respond and limit the destructive effects of a disaster. In such circumstances, communication plays a vital role, whereby the consequences of tasks assigned to the workers for rescue and relief services may be streamlined by relaying necessary information among themselves. Moreover, most of the infrastructure is either severely damaged or completely destroyed in post-disaster scenarios; therefore, a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is used to carry out the rescue operation, as it does not require any pre-existing infrastructure. In this context, the current work proposes and validates an effective way to relay the crucial information through the development of an application and the deployment of an experimental TestBed in a vehicular environment. The TestBed may able to provide a way to design and validate the algorithms. It provides a number of vehicles with onboard units embedded with a credit-card-size microcomputer called Raspberry Pi and a Global Positioning System (GPS) module. Additionally, it dispatches one of the pre-defined codes of emergency messages based on the level of urgency through multiple hops to a central control room. Depending on the message code received from a client, the server takes appropriate action. Furthermore, the solution also provides a graphical interface that is easy to interpret and to understand at the control room to visualize the rescue operation on the fly.

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Flying ad hoc network (FANET) provides portable and flexible communication for many applications and possesses several unique design challenges; a key one is the successful delivery of messages to the destination, reliably. For reliable communication, routing plays an important role, which establishes a path between source and destination on the basis of certain criteria. Conventional routing protocols of FANET generally use a minimum hop count criterion to find the best route between source and destination, which results in lower latency with the consideration that there is single source/destination network environment. However, in a network with multiple sources, the minimum hop count routing criterion along with the 1-Hop HELLO messages broadcasted by each node in the network may deteriorate the network performance in terms of high End-to-End (ETE) delay and decrease in the lifetime of the network. This research work proposes a Reliable link-adaptive position-based routing protocol (RLPR) for FANET. It uses relative speed, signal strength, and energy of the nodes along with the geographic distance towards the destination using a forwarding angle. This angle is used to determine the forwarding zone that decreases the undesirable control messages in the network in order to discover the route. RLPR enhances the network performance by selecting those relay nodes which are in the forwarding zone and whose geographic movement is towards the destination. Additionally, RLPR selects the next hop with better energy level and uses signal strength and relative speed of the nodes to achieve high connectivity-level. Based on the performance evaluation performed in the Network simulator (ns-2.35), it has been analysed that RLPR outperforms the Robust and reliable predictive based routing (RARP) and Ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) protocols in different scenarios. The results show that RLPR achieves a 33% reduction in control messages overhead as compared to RARP and 45% reduction as compared to AODV. Additionally, RLPR shows a 55% improvement in the lifetime of the network as compared to RARP and 65% as compared to AODV. Moreover, the search success rate in RLPR is 16% better as compared to RARP and 28% as compared to AODV.

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