Virtualized multihop access networks for disaster recovery

Abstract

Disasters may destroy everything including communication infrastructures isolating people in the disaster-stricken areas. Recovery of these infrastructures is often prolonged which is not suitable for disastrous fast-responses. This paper proposes a wireless multihop access network virtualization (WMANV) approach thereby users/victims are provided Internet access transparently. Concretely, users are provided Internet connection via multihop wireless access networks as if they are connecting to conventional access points (APs) using their commodity mobile devices. A tree-based architecture was proposed to realize the concept of WMANV. This approach allows participating mobile nodes (MNs) to contribute on growing up access networks, thus provide the Internet connection means to further disconnected MNs. The feasibility and the scalability of the proposed approach have been verified by real deployments and experimental evaluations.