An IoT-based middleware for mobility management in post-emergency networks

In the recent years, the number of emergencies has been observed to increase exponentially. In emergency-affected networks, knowledge of realistic user mobility plays a key role to provide critical services and information. Since present models fail to capture actual post-emergency user movements, a realistic post-emergency mobility model has recently been proposed. Nevertheless, this model suffers from high evacuation delay due to hotspot issue. Simultaneously, it suffers from traffic congestion because of user initiated traffic explosion while seeking services/ information. Consequently, to alleviate these limitations, this work proposes a middleware based on the Internet-of-Things to manage user mobility in the post-emergency network. The proposed middleware, operating on a user's hand-held device, analyzes the context information obtained from the surrounding smart things to select an evacuation route for the user that optimizes the evacuation delay and the traffic congestion in the post-emergency network. Simulation results have been used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed middleware.