Disasters are catastrophic events that occur unexpectedly in a random manner. It is important that when a disaster occurs, the victims in the disaster area are rescued quickly to avoid massive casualties. Disaster areas may leave victims bereft of food, water, shelter and medical help. The goal of the work outlined in this paper is to study the movement of survivors towards rescue devices when barriers are involved. Barriers are obstacles that prevent both survivors and crewmembers from moving freely in a disaster area thereby slowing down rescue operations. It would therefore be necessary to study movements of survivors with barriers included in the simulations so as to produce more realistic results to be used when rescuing survivors in disaster areas.
KEYWORDSLevy walk, Levy flight, random walk, search and rescue network, power-law distributions AUTHORS Socrates E. Akpoyibo is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His research interest is in performance modeling of communication networks.Ram G. Lakshmi Narayanan is a Senior Architect, Innovations at Nokia Solutions Networks, USA. In the past 20 years he has worked on various research and innovation projects in the areas of mobile cloud computing, Software Defined Networks, Internet security and privacy, device-to-device communications, opportunistic networking, network analytics and machine learning. He has contributed to several standards working groups including Internet Engineering Task Force, Network Processing Forum, Service Availability Forum, trusted computing group and held NPF high availability task group chair position. He holds more than 25 patent and published several papers. He received the B.S. degree in
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