Heterogeneous IoT/LTE ProSe virtual infrastructure for disaster situations

• Published in: Journal of network and computer applications Vol. 213; p. 103602
• Main Authors: Abdellatif, Sami, Tibermacine, Okba, Bechkit, Walid, Bachir, Abdelmalik
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01-04-2023; Elsevier
• Subjects: Computer Science; D2D communication; Disaster recovery; LTE ProSe; Networking and Internet Architecture; 5G; D2D communication; LTE ProSe; Disaster recovery; Disaster Recovery LTE ProSe 5G D2D communication; Disaster Recovery
• ISSN: 1084-8045; 1095-8592
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jnca.2023.103602

Natural disasters of any kind can have catastrophic consequences for properties, infrastructure, and human lives. During large-scale calamities, two common problems are faced: (i) the partial or even complete destruction of communications infrastructure, and (ii) the difficulty of collecting accurate information on the disaster area and trapped victims. These two problems prevent a quick and accurate assessment of damage, leading to inefficient rescue operations and putting the lives of rescuers and victims in great danger. The LTE Proximity Services (ProSe) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are promising technologies that can offer an efficient solution to the aforementioned problems in the form of a rapidly established emergency network for post-disaster management. In this paper, we propose a solution for the establishment of an efficient emergency communications network for post-disaster situations based on the LTE Device-to-Device ProSe (D2D ProSe) technology and IoT devices. It facilitates fast and efficient service discovery that allows querying heterogeneous IoT devices such as health sensors, wireless cameras, smartwatches, or any other relevant devices or sensors. The goal is to allow rescuers to have access to information produced by various things available during the rescue operation. We take advantage of LTE ProSe to create a distributed D2D broadcast backbone that enables efficient and reliable message dissemination while reducing energy consumption and achieving high coverage. We then add a multipath forwarding mechanism, in which each service type of IoT device is ensured an optimal path for its traffic. Unlike previous works, we fully implemented our solution in the NS3 simulator and relied on realistic models (wireless channels, energy, and mobility) to evaluate its performance compared to previous solutions, which we also implemented on NS3. The obtained results show that our solution achieves significant improvement compared to those proposed in the literature. The entire code used in this project is freely available to the community through GitHub.11https://github.com/iorisam/NS3_ED2D_IoT.