New Safety Support System for Children on School Routes Using Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Atsushi ITO
Yoshiaki KAKUDA
Tomoyuki OHTA
Shinji INOUE

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E94-B    No.1    pp.18-29
Publication Date: 2011/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E94.B.18
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (IEICE/IEEE Joint Special Section on Autonomous Decentralized Systems Technologies and Their Application to Networked Systems)
Category: Assurance
Keyword: 
mobile ad hoc network,  safety support system for children,  Bluetooth,  mobile phone,  

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Summary: 
One of the most important duties of government is to maintain safety. In 2007, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan tested 16 different models of a safety support system for children on school routes. One of the models was constructed and tested at a school in an area of the city of Hiroshima from September to December of 2007. A consortium was established by the city of Hiroshima; Hiroshima City University; Chugoku Electric Power Co., Inc.; and KDDI Corporation to conduct this project. For the model project, we developed a new safety support system for children on school routes by using a mobile ad hoc network constructed from mobile phones with the Bluetooth function. About 500 students and 50 volunteers used this system for four months. The support system provided good performance and accuracy in maintaining the safety of students on the way to school [7]. The basic idea of the safety support system is the grouping of children and volunteers using a mobile ad hoc network. In this paper, we present an outline of this system and evaluate the performance of grouping and the effectiveness of our approach.