Designing delay constrained hybrid ad hoc network infrastructure for post-disaster communication

Following a disaster-strike, rapid and reliable communication between relief/rescue workers in the affected regions, and the control stations located at a distance, is essential. This is to facilitate seamless information exchange about the status of victims, requirement of relief personnel/commodities, supply chain of goods and services, and so on, thus rendering relief operations more timely and effective. However, the availability of Internet in a post-disaster scenario is ruled out more often than not; wireless communication and mobile phones may not be usable either except in only selected areas. Besides, geographical obstructions such as broken bridges or closed roads add to the worries of personnel trying to develop a temporary network infrastructure for effective communication. Furthermore, availability of resources – both technological and financial – may prove to be a bottleneck in case of disasters in under-developed regions. Under such circumstances, a post-disaster communication network need to be developed to meet the following: (i) close to 100% information packet delivery, (ii) minimum latency for information exchange, and (iii) compliance to the resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a latency-aware four-tier planned hybrid architecture to tackle the aforementioned challenges and focus on extensive modeling and analysis of the planned network architecture. For detailed evaluation with the help of case study scenarios, we make use of the ONE Simulator, customized to suit our requirements. Additionally, we measure the improvement in network resources utilization and performance achieved with modeling of the architecture over that without modeling.