A delay-efficient channel allocation scheme for disseminating alert messages using WBAN and VANET

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) provide an extensive number of services through a collection of applications for intelligent transportation. It mainly reduces the difficulties for the drivers of vehicles by generating alerts for any unforeseen road accidents, warnings and road congestions in real time. Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) facilitates remote health monitoring for patients and elderly people in healthcare sector. This paper proposes an architecture which combines WBAN and VANET — WBAN is used for patient monitoring while travelling and VANET takes the charge of delivering the alert message generated from abnormal physiological data of the patient to its destination. A Road Side Unit (RSU) allocates distinct channels to the On Board Units (OBU) of vehicles that ask for it. However, allocation scheme taking the priority of the OBUs into account allocates the channels. An OBU will send the emergency messages using the assigned channel. In this work, we develop a novel technique to compute the priority of vehicles using three important criteria such as severity of the message, vehicle speed, and channel occupancy time. The technique utilized two multi-criteria based decision making schemes — Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for finding a weight for individual criterion, and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for computing normalized priority values of vehicles. The main aim of this work is to minimize the End-to-End delay of alert messages. Our simulation study shows that our proposed scheme provides better results as compared to the standard scheme.