DPDRM: A decentralized post-disaster resource management scheme using energy efficient smart phone based DTN

Abstract

Large-scale natural disasters affect traditional communication infrastructure due to incidental destructions and damages. Delay-tolerant networks (DTN) proves to be a viable option for exchanging information during such scenarios. Different disaster management agencies setup camps and mobilize their resources and manpower in the affected areas after the disaster. Resource management is an integral part of post-disaster relief operation. Each camp manages its own resource inventory. Periodic sharing of resource inventories from different camps is essential for maintaining a near-accurate unified global inventory at each node that enables successful search and retrieval of resource requests (queries). But, due to the intermittent network connectivity, maintaining such a consistent resource inventory and successful search/retrieval of queries becomes challenging. We map this post-disaster resource management as a content sharing problem with strict time constraint and propose an automated, energy efficient and decentralized resource management scheme over DTN. The proposed scheme allows periodic group based sharing of resource inventories and supports search and retrieval of queries within a restricted time period. Here, resource inventories are shared among the group members by employing publish-subscribe mechanism. Moreover the queries are propagated to the group members based on the probability of encounters. This probabilistic propagation controls the unintended replication of query. Finally, the proposed scheme is evaluated through ONE simulator based on a realistic post-disaster scenario of the 2015 Nepal earthquake. The results reveal that our proposed scheme outperforms one of the state-of-the-art content sharing schemes, discover-predict-deliver in terms of response delivery, average energy consumption and average delivery latency.