Feasibility Validation of WiFi Based Multihop Access Network for Disaster Recovery

Abstract

Agile providing Internet connectivity to the victims right after a disaster occurs is essential to mitigate loss and save people. It is hard, however, to quickly recover communication infrastructures due to many difficulties such as reach ability to the destroyed areas, heavy and wide-area damages requiring a huge amount of resources and human power to recover, and so forth. WiFi based multihop access network establishment leveraging on-site commodity mobile devices has the potential to disaster recovery. This approach does not require additional hardware such as network interface cards (NICs) or pre-installed multihop routing protocols on mobile devices as in conventional ad-hoc networks. Instead, it leverages the available WiFi NIC on the mobile device to share its Internet connectivity to the nearby nodes. As a result, Internet connectivity can be quickly brought to further victims. However, we still lack an understanding of its true potential in real environments. This paper provides a comprehensive field experiment using our proof-of-concept prototype. The results reveal the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed network as it can easily extend to 20 hops and cover a large area, around one kilometer in diameter.