Opportunistic alert diffusion in disaster scenario — Stay alive longer !

Opportunistic communications present a promising solution as a disaster network recovery in emergency situations such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods where infrastructure might be damaged. Recent works have proposed opportunistic-based disaster recovery solutions. However, two main features were left behind. On the one hand, these works do not consider the assortment of networks integrated in mobile devices (e.g. WiFi-Direct, WiFi ad-hoc, bluetooth). Moreover, they do not consider mobile devices that come with various energy levels. This paper proposes COPE, a cooperative opportunistic alert diffusion approach for disaster scenario useful for trapped survivors. COPE considers mobile devices equipped with multiple network interfaces and have various battery power levels. In order to maintain mobile devices alive longer, survivors form cliques and zones in which they diffuse alternately and periodically alert messages until reaching a potential rescuers. Simulation results show that COPE largely outperforms the selfish diffusion scheme in terms of energy consumption while guaranteeing an important alert delivery success.