Design and Deployment of UAV-Aided Post-Disaster Emergency Network

Abstract

Designing a reliable, resilient, and quickly deployable emergency communication network is a key challenge for post-disaster management. In this paper, a UAV-assisted emergency Wi-Fi network is proposed to expedite the rescue operations by guiding the survivors to the nearest rescue camp location. Here, the Raspberry PI (RPI) development board, mounted on UAV is considered to form a Wi-Fi chain network over the disaster region. During network set-up, the proposed solutions for the design challenges like UAV synchronization, avoid communication disruption and surveillance data management are the key contributions of this paper. The designed UAV network is capable of doing on-site surveillance and transmitting the data to the relief center for better rescue planning. One major challenge is to alert a survivor about the emergency network, which is addressed by designing a captive portal. Furthermore, to extend the Wi-Fi network, an Android-based application is developed by which each smartphone acts as a relay for its neighbor. Three types of field experiment are carried out to evaluate the performance of the designed prototype. It is found from the field results; the Wi-Fi access point mode and user datagram protocol are more suitable for network design as compared to Ad-Hoc mode and transmission control protocol, respectively. It is also observed from the experiment that the maximum hop distance for the prototype is 280 meters and 290 meters for a Wi-Fi configuration following IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11ac protocol, respectively.