Resilient and Reliable Communication for First Responders with Ad-Hoc Network and MPTCP

Abstract

In severe hazardous situations, reliable network communication is an important infrastructure for conveying vital real-time information from sensors embedded in first responders. Important communications and emergency information must be received quickly to make critical decisions, improve situation awareness, and save lives. It is always challenging to ensure that the network is continuously available. To ensure seamless, fault-tolerant, and secure communication, we propose a new communication system for first responders. In this novel architecture, we improve the reliability of our communication networks using three techniques: Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP), Optimized Linked State Routing Protocol (OLSR) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for portable devices and cloud services. MPTCP enables rapid recovery when a TCP connection fails. OLSR enables routes through Ad Hoc networks. MQTT enables efficient transmission of sensor data. We have implemented the above reliable communication network and conducted various experiments to show improvement in reliability. The results show that our proposed method can be quickly deployed and provides reliability in the communication network despite the failure of some network infrastructures.