Design of Agency Communication for Contingency Cellular Network

Contingency Cellular Network (CCN) is proposed for Mission Critical Public-Safety Networking in natural disaster by using wireless links to connect disconnected base stations together and constructing a wireless multi-hop cellular network. CCN can provide service to existing large number of mobile phone users with reduced capability. The receiver of a phone call is usually a resource owner (agent) in a disaster area, not a particular person. Instead of dialing a real phone number, we designed a special Agency Communication Mode which allows its users to initiate a call to a nearby resource by dialing a designated agent number. A small-scale prototype that includes laptop PCs with IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN to emulate the CCN network and Android smart phones with VoIP software to emulate user terminals is implemented to verify our design. Finally, a series of experiments used to evaluate the performance of the prototype system is conducted. According to the experimental results, it shows that the prototype system can respond promptly to the user registration and call set-up requests. Mouth-to-Ear Delay can be effectively controlled below 400 ms when there are no more than 30 calls originated. This system may be used as a reference for the future development of contingency communication networks.