Bilateral routing in emergency response networks

Abstract

An emergency response networking scenario is considered, in which immediately after the strike of a disaster, mobile terminals autonomously form an ad-hoc network. Distress nodes, use this network to disseminate help-requests as a far outcry mechanism. In turn, and upon their arrival, emergency response units opt to gain access to the withstanding ad-hoc network in order to retrieve those disseminated help requests; invaluable information that would allow timely response to those distress nodes. This work is concerned with Bilateral Routing, an algorithm that best meets the requirements and constraints for help-request dissemination and retrieval in emergency scenarios. A novel explore-and-exploit dissemination strategy is detailed that clearly outperforms traditional dissemination mechanisms. The strategy takes into account both centrality and battery power of each node, to increase survivability and allow for a subsequent detection of help-requests by response units. The latter, search through reachable network nodes to retrieve new and unattended help requests. Extensive numerical results illustrate the decisive applicability of Bilateral Routing in emergency response networking scenarios.