Abstract
Disasters often result in a tremendous cost to our society. Previously, wireless sensor networks have been proposed to provide information for decision making in postdisaster relief operations. The existing WSN solutions for postdisaster operations normally assume that the deployed sensor network can tolerate the damage caused by disasters and maintain its connectivity and coverage, even though a significant portion of nodes have been physically destroyed. Inspired by the “blackbox” technique, we propose that preserving “the last snapshot” of the whole network and transferring those data to a safe zone would be the most logical approach to provide necessary information for rescuing lives and control damages. In this paper, we introduce data evacuation (DE), an original idea that takes advantage of the survival time of the WSN, that is, the gap from the time when the disaster hits and the time when the WSN is paralyzed, to transmit critical data to sensor nodes in the safe zone. Numerical investigations reveal the effectiveness of our proposed DE algorithm.
Highlights
While disasters could result in a tremendous cost to our society, access to environment information in the affected area, such as, damage level and life signals, has been proven crucial for relief operations
We present two alternatives data evacuation (DE) protocols, each of which is a greedy algorithm seeking to optimize one design metric. e rst protocol routes the critical information through effective evacuation paths following the highest gradient in the disaster intensity map, and denoted as GRAD-DE. e second protocol routes the critical information by effective evacuation paths leading to the closest safe zone with the largest storage capacity
In this paper, motivated by the serious damages incurred by a few recent disasters around the globe, we have investigated on how to apply wireless sensor networks for postdisaster relief operations in a more realistic situation, where the sensor nodes could be paralyzed by the devastating events
Summary
While disasters could result in a tremendous cost to our society, access to environment information in the affected area, such as, damage level and life signals, has been proven crucial for relief operations. Wireless sensor networks [2,3,4] have been proposed to gather useful information in disasters such as earthquake, volcano eruption, and mining accidents. Even with sensor networks, gathering crucial information in postdisaster relief operations turns out unpredictably challenging. Our proposed data evacuation works under extreme situations, requiring different design metrics from normal wireless sensor networks. Rather than seeking the analytical solution for such a formulation, we take a pragmatic approach to design distributed protocols to route the vital data to safe zones in an affected region. (iii) Extensive simulation has been conducted to verify the efficacy of GRAD-DE and GRAV-DE and illustrate the fundamental tradeoff between the two design metrics: evacuation time and evacuation ratio.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
