A smartphone-assisted device-to-device communication for post-disaster recovery

Abstract

Natural disasters like earthquakes often cause partial or complete breakdown of existing telecommunication infrastructure leaving the helpless people in the affected areas without means of exchanging emergency messages. Under such situations, a temporary ad-hoc system to help in exchanging emergency communication messages and post-disaster recovery can be set up utilising the smartphones of affected victims and the IoT devices of the smarthomes in the affected areas and this paper proposes a method to do that. In the proposed method, smarthome IoT devices are set up to act as relay nodes to communicate emergency messages in absence of a fully functioning telecommunication network. A relay node is chosen based on multiple independent parameters like the residual lifetime of an IoT device and its degree of connectivity. MATLAB-based simulations conducted prove the efficiency of the method.