Topology reconfiguration in IEEE 802.15.4 WPANs for emergency management

Communication networks play a fundamental role in the response to massive catastrophes. In case of emergency, the main purpose of public authorities is to avoid damages for people and for buildings and the presence of a reliable communication infrastructure is vital. In this context, the use of IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Personal Area Networks seems particularly appropriate to allow communications among security agents and for data collection, thanks to their characteristics of self-configurability, flexibility and low cost. In this work we present a centralized algorithm that selects the best node to perform the PAN coordination in accordance to rules related to the concept of network depth and we extend the proposal with a distributed heuristic in order to have it working in an autonomic way. Performance results show that our approach achieves a better distribution of nodes in the network topology, with a well-known impact on key performance related to energy consumption and data delivery delay.