Disaster Area Network Expansion Using Drones Based Ad-hoc Cellular Communications

Abstract

The aftermath of a disaster is a state of an emer-gency with damaged cellular towers and broken communication links. The situation requires a rapidly deployable communications network to conduct rescue operations. This paper presents a network architecture for handling disaster area communication, dealing with the execution of routing protocols fulfilling the network requirements. The study uses the NetSim network tool combined with the MATLAB API for designing the model. Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is simulated using drones as the mobile nodes providing connectivity with the victim cell phones. The data from the network is communicated to the fixed-mobile infrastructure through a base station mounted on a mobile remote vehicle (MRV). The effectiveness of the network is bench-marked based on battery usage, latency, and reliability of communication. The study's outcome is to reduce the communication delay, minimise the drone platform's energy consumption, and improve routing efficiency. The comparison shows DSR to have 0.1% and 0.2% better battery consumption than the AODV and OLSR, respectively. At the same time, OLSR is found to have the best response with the highest throughput of 0.59Mbps and low network latency of 0.277 microseconds.