Provision of an emergency warning service through GPRS: performance evaluation

The investigation presented is focused on the methodologies to take advantage of the new communications technologies in vehicular traffic, improving security and efficiency. In this work, we show how to provide traffic and road information to users in vehicles coming up to dangerous situations through the use of the GPRS (general packet radio service) network and we analytically evaluate the probability to avoid the high risk zone for an equipped GPRS vehicle next to an accident. The results presented were obtained in the framework of the GITS (GPRS for intelligent transportation system) project, whose aim was to exploit the GPRS network to collect traffic information concerning the vehicles transiting in a covered area and to transmit traffic information to the drivers.