Performance evaluation of process-oriented wireless relay deployment in emergency scenarios

In emergency operations, upcoming rescue support systems, like first responders´ helmet cameras, raise the need for reliable networks with high data rates and low latency. Typically, in such environments, existing infrastructure networks are often congested or, even worse, destroyed and are therefore useless for rescue personnel. Thereby, rescue organizations have recently offered increased attention to wireless mesh network as a high-performance and low-cost solution for an ad hoc incident network. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a novel process-oriented way for wireless mesh relay deployment in emergency scenarios. Our approach tackles the problem of the management and the involving of rescue personnel in the placement of mesh nodes. For that end, we propose to integrate wireless relays in fire hose couplings so that these relays cover the whole area of interest in a process oriented way. The packet delivery ratio and round trip time of our solution approach is compared with the performance of the Steiner tree-based theoretical approach for optimized positioned wireless relays. We investigate three scenarios with a rising number of network nodes and senders. The results show that our solution approach achieves comparable performance to its theoretical counterpart, while being much more comfortable for network deployment and post-mission node collection.