An Evacuation System Using Autonomous Clustering-Based MANET for Sharing Disaster Information

Abstract

In case of emergency situation such as torrential rainfall and earthquake, local residents may be needed for moving to refuge areas which are nearby sites managed by local governments. They want to understand the disaster information and road information correctly and evacuate quickly and efficiently. However, in such case, it is expected that the infrastructure networks (cellular networks) might have heavy traffic due to the network congestion. Therefore, this paper proposes an evacuation system based on the information sharing scheme which uses both mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and cellular networks flexibly. The users share the disaster information among users through the MANET and the cellular network. In the MANET, the mobile terminals are managed by groups which are configured by nearby terminals called clusters. The cluster consists of one cluster head, which manages the cluster, and cluster members. The cluster head which receives the disaster information from the cluster members in the cluster through the MANET shares the collected disaster information among other cluster heads through the cellular network. The proposed evacuation system can mitigate the traffic of the cellular networks because only cluster heads access to the base stations to share them. From the simulation experiments using geographical information, we show the effectiveness of the proposed evacuation system in terms of the users' evacuation time and the network traffic.