Emergency Evacuation System for Clogging-Free and Shortest-Safe Path Navigation with IoT-Enabled WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a vital role in the development of emergency evacuation systems. The main objective of the emergency evacuation system is to find a safe path for every individual by using the Internet of Things (IoT)-based WSNs, whenever an emergency arises. The major drawback of the existing approaches is that they ignore the clogging of individuals taking the same route to exit. Therefore, this article proposes an emergency evacuation system for clogging-free and shortest-safe path navigation (ECSSN) with IoT-enabled WSNs. The ECSSN algorithm detects the hazards, such as fire or harmful gases and humans, which creates an emergency in the indoor monitoring environment. Furthermore, several safety layers around the dangerous zones are created using a multisource breadth-first search (MBFS) algorithm. Therefore, the individuals near or far away from the hazardous region are directed along the clogging-free and shortest-safe path to the destination exit. The ECSSN algorithm also considers the dynamic emergency by taking and solving the current scenario's input from sensor nodes after every fixed time interval. The proposed algorithm is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of execution time, average path stretch, and navigation overhead to prove the efficacy and competence of the ECSSN algorithm. © 2014 IEEE.