P-VERSE: Prioritization of Vehicles to Enhance Road Safety in IoT Environment

In this article, we propose a scheme, named P-VERSE, to prioritize the emergency vehicles (ERVs) in the absence of a traffic signal at a multiway intersection point on a road. We consider the ERVs, such as ambulance, fire trucks, or police vehicles, as prioritized vehicles and provide them safe and quick passage. The traffic signal is a traditional approach to minimize congestion, avoid collision among the vehicles, and reduce accidents. However, this results in the repetitive interruption of vehicles, thereby increasing their waiting time. To address these issues, we formulate a scheme that executes in two stages. In the first stage, we use Markov Chain to predict the future path of each vehicular nodes. Based on the predicted path, the common and ERVs cooperatively form groups to avoid collision and congestion at the intersection point. On the other hand, in the second stage, we apply a cooperative coalition-based game-theoretic approach to design the strategic interactions among the vehicular nodes. These vehicular nodes act as players and dynamically form coalitions among them. Depending upon the utility of the coalition, the vehicular nodes either merge with or split out from a coalition. These nodes form a coalition to provide safe passage to the ERVs. Further, we constrain our optimization problem to the Karush-Kuhn–Tucker (KKT). Extensive simulation-based analysis of our proposed scheme, P-VERSE, demonstrates that the energy consumption is reduced and utility is improved by 31.37% and 42.28% compared to the existing schemes.