Adaptive redistribution of resources for ensuring service quality in a post disaster situation analysis network

Abstract

In disaster affected regions, communication and coordination among different authorities like volunteers, army and government personals are extremely important for smooth rescue operations. A major problem faced by the rescue workers during post disaster scenario is the frequent communication disruption from the conventional networks (like cellular), and therefore information collection and coordination among different parties get affected. To meet the coordination requirements of victims as well as rescue team members, we need to provide continuous, effective and reliable communication channels. Therefore, there is a requirement to build an alternate ad hoc network infrastructure that is efficient, robust and scalable in information exchange with minimum setup time and within cost constraints. In this paper, we consider a three-tier network architecture to support above mentioned challenges and focus on providing efficient information transfer with minimum data loss and compliance to network constraints. It provides end-to-end connectivity between workers/volunteers and control station, that requires large amount of packet exchange. It can be noted that this alternate network is primarily developed for information collection from the affected regions, and therefore, based on the information availability at different regions, there is a requirement to redistribute network resources like bandwidth, delay constraints etc. As a consequence, we need an adaptive and efficiently redistribution of network resources for ensuring service quality. In this paper, we develop an algorithm for efficient routing over the proposed alternate communication infrastructure, considering redistribution of resources and dynamic bandwidth utilization based on information availability at different disaster affected regions. The proposed network architecture along with the resource redistribution algorithm is implemented over ONE network simulator framework, and the performance of the scheme is analyzed and compared with other state-of-the-art mechanisms for challenged networks.