Abstract
Natural disasters often destroy and disrupt communication infrastructures that hinder the utilization of disaster applications and services needed by emergency responders. During these circumstances an implementation of a standalone communication system (SCS) that serves as an alternative communication platform for vital disaster management activities is essential. In this study, we present a design and implementation of an SCS realized using an inexpensive microcontroller platform. Specifically, the study employed Raspberry Pi (RPi) devices as rapidly deployable relay nodes designed with a context-aware routing mechanism. The routing mechanism decides the most efficient route to send messages or disseminate information in the network by utilizing a context-aware factor (CF) calculated using several context information such as delivery probability and link quality. Moreover, with the use of this context information, the proposed scheme aims to reduce communication delay and overhead in the network commonly caused by resource contention of users. The performance of the proposed SCS, was evaluated in a small-area case-scenario deployment using a messaging application and web-based monitoring service. Additionally, a simulation-based performance analysis of the proposed context-aware routing mechanism applied to an urban area map was also conducted. Furthermore, in the simulation, the proposed scheme was compared to the most commonly used Flooding and AODV schemes for SCS. Results show a high delivery probability, faster delivery time (low latency) and reduced message overhead when using the proposed approach compared with the other routing schemes.
Highlights
According to the 2016 World Disaster Report [1], 574 major disasters occurred around the world have been recorded by the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters’ Emergency Events Database [2]
The other context information incorporated in this work is the link quality, for a simpler approach, we adopted the Link Quality metric used in [18] which is based on the connection quality measured by the relay nodes using received signal strength indicator (RSSI)
The simulation scenario was performed with a 1:10:1 relay node to a user and disaster responder ratio which involves 20 relay nodes, 200 mobile devices, and 20 emergency responders in 2000x1000m area for an 8-hour period and the relay nodes are deployed in the area randomly with a given restriction that they are within range with one relay node
Summary
According to the 2016 World Disaster Report [1], 574 major disasters occurred around the world have been recorded by the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters’ Emergency Events Database [2]. There may be few communication infrastructures remaining, and the problem in network congestion occurs as a greater number of users try to utilize the scarce communication resources [8] In these circumstances, when both emergency responders (ERs) and normal users utilize and rely on the remaining infrastructure, bottlenecks often go undiscovered, pushing the infrastructure to its limit and making the services completely limited or cut off completely at some point in time. With the advancement in wireless technologies and the inexpensiveness of devices capable of building special-purpose networks, the design and development of SCSs and services have become more interesting research area in recent years With this growing trend in SCSs and the development of valuable network solutions during disasters, this study presents a model SCS using inexpensive microcontroller platform that aims to serve as an alternative network for the infrastructure-stricken area, especially during a disaster.
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
