Leveraging MEC in a 5G System for Enhanced Back Situation Awareness

5G has opened up possibilities of introducing new use cases and business models that could not be perceived before. In the context of public safety, 5G offers immense opportunities towards enhancing mission success and situation awareness during emergency management. This paper introduces Back-Situation Awareness (BSA) application enabling early warning/notification to vehicles of an approaching emergency vehicle indicating its presence and the time it will arrive. Such an application is expected to give drivers enough time to create a safety corridor for the emergency vehicle to pass through safely and unhindered. We provide details on the system and application design of the BSA application leveraging Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) systems that complement the 5G mobile communication system. An evaluation of the application is provided by using data measurements and indicating the accuracy of the computation and notification of the Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) based on the ETSI C-ITS protocol messages.