An approach for short message resilience in disaster-stricken areas

Large scale disasters may destroy essential network infrastructures and cause network-based service failure over a large area. Communication between two nodes in a resilient network should continue without any support of network infrastructure. Delay and Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) is the choice for network resilience because it is not dependent on any infrastructure and supports flexibility in link delay and availability. Network resilience must consider the power limitations of the nodes and unusually very high traffic demand after a disaster hits. Existing DTN routing protocols´ performances are not satisfactory in terms of the two most important metrics of communication in a disaster-stricken area-message delivery ratio and residual energy of the communicating devices. We propose a new message routing mechanism, called Location-aware Message Delivery (LMD), for communicating among wireless devices that uses greedy forwarding towards the intended destinations. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach in the delivery ratio and energy saving of the devices. Overall efficiency of our scheme is superior to those of compared DTN routing protocols.