Alternative Opportunistic Alert Diffusion to Support Infrastructure Failure during Disasters

Abstract

Opportunistic communications present a promising solution for disaster network recovery in emergency situations such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods, where infrastructure might be destroyed. Some recent works in the literature have proposed opportunistic-based disaster recovery solutions, but they have omitted the consideration of mobile devices that come with different network technologies and various initial energy levels. This work presents COPE, an energy-aware Cooperative OPportunistic alErt diffusion scheme for trapped survivors to use during disaster scenarios to report their position and ease their rescue operation. It aims to maintain mobile devices functional for as long as possible for maximum network coverage until reaching proximate rescuers. COPE deals with mobile devices that come with an assortment of networks and aims to perform systematic network interface selection. Furthermore, it considers mobile devices with various energy levels and allows low-energy nodes to hold their charge for longer time with the support of high-energy nodes. A proof-of-concept implementation has been performed to study the doability and efficiency of COPE, and to highlight the lessons learned.

Opportunistic Multi-Technology Cooperative Scheme and UAV Relaying for Network Disaster Recovery

“…While most of the current work leverages only few of the available network technologies to build their solutions upon [7], the work in [17] exploits all such interfaces for alert diffusion during disasters. However, it only mitigates the energy expenditure of the nodes by scheduling shorter wake-up periods for nodes with low available energy levels.…”

The potential of cooperative communications to speed up disaster relief operations

“…The ground component builds on heterogeneous devices that self-organize to leverage cooperative communications. This mechanism, called COPE [6] is rather simple. At bootstrap, every node activates its lowest communication interface n 1 and broadcast periodically some Hello messages in order to discover nearby nodes also active on this layer.…”

“…Such a cooperative communication based self-organization scheme allows all nodes to stay alive as long as possible as Figure 4 shows as compared to a selfish approach in which each node just activates all its communication interface. The full evaluation results are available in [6].…”

“…Recently, disseminating data in post-disaster situations has received increasing attention [2]- [6]. But we believe that none of these works exploits the full potential of autonomous wireless devices neither considers the full picture of the situation.…”

Benchmarking Smartphone Performances for Cooperative Disaster Alert Diffusion

“…Unlike existing works, in a previous work, we have proposed a cooperative opportunistic alert diffusion solution named COPE useful for survivors during disasters to report their location, thus, to speed up their rescue operation [4]. COPE leverages multiple network technologies and considers mobile devices that come with various initial energy levels.…”