Realistic Mobility Aware Information Gathering in Disaster Areas

In this paper, we propose a method for realistic mobility aware information gathering in disaster areas. In the proposed method, a disaster area is divided into a grid, and each node´s safety information is held in its pre-defined home grid cells, and it can be referred by sending a query to mobile nodes in its home cells. In this paper, we propose an autonomous adaptable protocol so that it can adapt to a variety of realistic network environments. In order to achieve speedy and high propagation, we combine the notions of store/forward in opportunistic networks and geographical routing in MANETs. In the proposed protocol, if intermediate nodes cannot relay safety information to its home cells by multi-hop communication, they hold it until they meet preceding nodes and re-transmit it as proxies. If a shortest path is not available, a detour is autonomously found. We have evaluated the proposed method under realistic pedestrian flows using our network simulator MobiREAL, and shown that it can work well.