Toward a new backpressure-based framework to enhance situational awareness in disaster response

Crises generate intense need to communication not just as a panic reaction to crisis, but also due the critical need for communication in order to better coordinate during response activities. In the afterward of a disaster, the lack of resources to handle this increase of data, due to the fragility of network infrastructures, leads to network congestion or overload. The results is that critical data are prevented from reaching decision makers, which has a direct impact on situational-awareness. To overcome this problem, we propose a new cross layer architecture for Wireless Mesh Network with a twofold objective: one, to include a filtering system able to identify the most critical data and two, to propose a routing layer with the capacity to prioritize these data while ensuring the stability and throughput optimality of the whole network. The proposed solution combines both by proposing an adjustable and fully distributed version of the high throughput efficient Backpressure routing protocol, with a geolocation and role-based filtering and prioritizing system. Both components collaborate in a way to identify and send most critical data, using a lower end-to-end delay, without however starving less critical data. Extensive experiments, using NS-3 simulator, are used to validate the proposal and confirm the high impact of the introduced ideas.