Multihop wireless access networks for flood mitigation crowd-sourcing systems

Abstract

Natural disasters can be mitigated or even anticipated if we have appropriate means, in terms of communications and data sharing models, to collect relevant data in advance or during disaster occurrences, which can be used for supporting disaster prevention and recovery processes. This work proposes a framework that encourages people to collect and share data about disaster, especially flood in Ho Chi Minh City, via on-site established multihop wireless access networks configured by the sharing of internet connectivity in users’ mobile devices. For connectivity sharing, on-the-fly establishment of multihop wireless access network (OEMAN) scheme is thoroughly analyzed and improved to resolve its inherent issue on traffic load imbalance due to its tree-based structure. More specifically, we propose a linear program for overload-aware routing optimization considering wireless interference. Evaluations implemented in Matlab show that the overload-aware routing improves load balancing among available virtual access points in OEMAN. By avoiding nodes with heavy load in the network, our solution improves network throughput compared to overload-unaware routing protocols.