Unmanned aerial vehicles operated emergency ad hoc networks

Abstract

One of the vital application of Emergency Ad hoc Networks is to establish communication between those affected by emergency situation and responders providing services. In most such cases, the conventional communication infrastructure such as wired and cellular networks get damaged and therefore cannot provide communication required to exchange emergency information. Therefore, to cope with such disasters in a fast and coordinated way, the optimal provisioning of the emergency information is crucial. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are the paramount components for such situations. UAVs can act as mobile base stations and facilitate wireless communication to connect to nearest working telephone network access point. A large scale disaster information system can be formed by combining UAV network with existing available network regardless of some of network lines being damaged and destroyed. In this paper, we have designed a prototype of UAV assisted emergency ad hoc network (EANET). We have also evaluated and compared AODV and ZRP routing protocols by varying the number of UAV assisted EANET nodes in different transmission range cases of disaster scenarios. The experimental results illustrate that ZRP is the most appropriate protocol for emergency situations.