An Energy-Efficient Clustering and Routing Framework for Disaster Relief Network

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The lack of communication between local authorities, first aid responders, and the population that are present in a natural disaster area, represents critical aspects which can compromise relief operations in saving human lives. During natural disasters (earthquakes/tsunamis), the typical telecommunications network infrastructure in the affected area could be damaged or unfunctional. This can seriously compromise the efficiency of first aid operations. In this paper, we propose a device-to-device (D2D)-based framework which, starting from some basic information such as positions and battery level of victim’s devices, could provide communication from a disaster area towards a functional area. This framework, utilized by a base station located in a functional area, organizes users of disaster area into clusters of users and for each cluster select a gateway. This framework permits also, to evaluate the optimal transmission power for each gateway in order to maximize the energy efficiency in the area and to create a multi-hop path from the disaster area to relay node minimizing the end-to-end delay. The simulations results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms either random policy assignment and static policies assignment in both power allocation and routing path creations.