Evaluations of commodity WiFi-based multihop access network for disaster recovery

Quick recovery of internet connectivity in the damaged areas right after a disaster occurs is crucial to mitigate loss and save people. However, it is hard to recover agilely communication infrastructures because of their drastic destruction and reachability limitation to the damaged areas. Wireless multihop access network has the potential to disaster recovery as it can agilely provide the internet connectivity to the victims using their mobile devices. We propose a WiFi-based multihop access network approach in which the networks are established by commodity mobile devices leveraging their built-in WiFi network interface card (NIC). A connected mobile device can share its internet connectivity to the nearby nodes and so forth. As a result, internet connectivity is brought to further victims quickly, bridging them with the outside world. However, the true potential of this solution in real environments has not been well evaluated. This paper provides a comprehensive field experiment using our proof-of-concept prototype. The results reveal the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed network as it can easily extend to 20 hops covering a large enough area for typical disaster, around one kilometre in diameter of damage area.