SmartDR: A Device-to-Device Communication for Post-Disaster Recovery

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, can cause severe destruction and create havoc in the society.Buildings and other structures may collapse during disaster incidents causing injuries and deaths to victims trapped under debris and rubble. Immediately after a natural disaster incident, it becomes extremely difficult for first responders and rescuers to find and save trapped victims. Often searches are carried out blindly in random locations, which delay the rescue of the victims. This paper introduces a Smartphone Assisted Disaster Recovery (SmartDR) method for post-disaster communication using Smartphones. SmartDR utilizes the device-to-device (D2D) communication technology in Fifth Generation (5G) networks, which enables direct communication between proximate devices without the need of relaying through a network infrastructure, such as mobile access points or mobile base stations. We examine a scenario of multi-hop D2D communication where smartphones carried by trapped victims and other people in disaster affected areas can self-detect the occurrence of a disaster incident by monitoring the radio environment and then can self-switch to a disaster mode to transmit emergency help messages with their location coordinates to other nearby smartphones. To locate other nearby smartphones also operating in the disaster mode and in the same channel, each smartphone runs a rendezvous process. The emergency messages are thus relayed to the functional base station or rescue centre. To facilitate routing of the emergency messages, we propose a path selection algorithm, which considers both delay and the leftover energy of a device (a smartphone in this case). Thus, the SmartDR method includes: (i) a multi-channel channel hopping rendezvous protocol to improve the victim localization or neighbor discovery, and (ii) an energy-aware multi-path routing (Energy-aware ad-hoc on-demand distance vector or E-AODV) protocol to overcome the higher energy depletionrate at devices associated with single shortest path routing. The SmartDR method can guide search and rescue operations and increase the possibility of saving lives immediately aftermath a disasterincident. A simulation-based performance study is conducted to evaluate the protocol performance in post-disaster scenario. Simulation results show that a significant performance gain is achievable when a device utilises the channel information for the rendezvous process and the leftover energy.