Adaptive routing strategy for emergency applications in smart campus

Abstract

Smart campuses consider that building and people are the holders of the sensor nodes. These nodes can be stationary or mobile, the former are attached to buildings, while the latter are carried by people and move as they go such as smartphones, smart watches, tablets, etc. These components are considered a hybrid network that includes static and dynamic nodes that are connected with each other. The smart applications that can use this kind of networks vary from the emergency, advertising, to announcements applications. Practically, implementing alternative networks in smart campuses poses challenges due to the limited capabilities of hardware, software, and connectivity of nodes. One of the major issues is the unpredictable consumption of resources in such networks, particularly in emergency and disaster situations where traditional Internet connectivity may not be available. This work suggests approaches that can be adopted in the applications of smart campuses. To this end, real-world situations are simulated aiming at testing the proposed approaches. Several routing protocols are involved and benchmarked. The assessment of the protocols is based on three metrics; messages spreading, places covered, and the number of nodes that received messages. The results show that the better selection of the routing protocols for smart campuses is based on the application required in campus. Therefore, this work suggests what is termed message-specific efficient message-oriented routing (EMOR) as approach for alternative network applications in smart campuses where the selection of the routing protocol should be adaptively changed over time as needed (e.g., emergency, announcements, advertising, etc.).