Enhancing service provisioning within heterogeneous wireless networks for emergency situations

Abstract

Emergency situations where lives are at stake, such as natural disasters, accidents, or serious fire, require low reaction times. Especially in sparsely populated areas the distance between the nearest emergency station and its disaster location may be quite large. In order to minimize reaction times, emergency communication is to be prioritized with respect to other network services. For enabling efficient and privileged usage of available network resources for emergency services, we propose to handle diverse service requests, ranging from emergency voice calls to bandwidth-consuming streaming services for emergency news, collaboratively by a Joint Call Admision Control (JCAC) and Dynamic Bandwidth Adaptation (DBA) approach. Therefore, we introduce a novel utility definition of services. It represents a generic measurement of the provided level of importance of the emergency service with respect to the common utility, i.e. the utility of service provisioning for the population. The designed JCAC and DBA algorithms cooperatively manage resources of heterogeneous wireless networks and aim at supporting a maximum number of requested services. Further, system utilization is optimized by improving the QoS characteristics of the already granted, elastic services. Simulation results show an improvement in the overall gained utility for emergency services compared to other research approaches. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.