Long Distance Wireless Disaster Information Network by Automatic Directional Antenna Control Method

It is proved that wireless network is suitable for disaster information infrastructure because of its robustness, mobility and flexibility. However current conventional wireless networks have limit in communication distance because of low electro-magnetic power density, non-directional antenna. This is quite fatal as emergency network particularly in mountain areas like Japan. In order to solve those problems, in this paper, we introduce a new long distance wireless Disaster information network by automatic directional antenna control method. In our system, the mobile node with mobile router and directional antennas are used on the disaster case to multi-hop relay the link or path at end-to-end nodes. The direction of the antennas are automatically controlled and adjusted to optimize the communication states, such as signal power density, throughput, packet loss, delay, depending on the user policy. The GPS data are also taken into account to determine the rough direction of the antenna angle. Eventually long distance communication can be realized using our suggested method. A prototype system is built to evaluate the functional and performance of the suggested system. As a result, we could verify the usefulness and effect of our suggested system.