Unmanned aerial vehicle-enabled layered architecture based solution for disaster management

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become a priority in the industrial and academic research community for the last few years. With the fast development of wireless networking technologies, it is widely used in many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue (SAR) operation, disaster management, remote monitoring, and so forth. Emergency communication for victims and first responders is one of the critical requirements during natural and human-made disasters. Airborne Base Stations (BS) or UAV-mounted BS has been used to provide high-speed internet services and rescue responses in natural disasters and emergencies in recent years. Most of the previous research on UAV-mounted BS (UAVmBS) only considers outdoor users. It assumes their coordinate position in a two-dimensional (2D) plane, taking only Euclidean pathloss-based distance into account. Though, in man-made or urban natural disaster situations such as floods, cyclones, building fires, and so forth, users are stuck in single or multistory high-rise buildings situated in a three-dimensional (3D) plane. In such cases, it is possible to interact and rescue reliably if pathloss features are known a priori, both for UAVmBS to users (downlink) and vice versa (uplink). As pathloss in the above situations is a mixture of outdoor and indoor elements, adopting a compatible model can be challenging for communications. This article proposes a layered architecture and studies the path loss models best suited for the disaster management system (DMS), which considers both indoor and outdoor parameters. Further, the main goal is to effectively implement a layered architecture employing UAVmBS in urban disasters for better capacity and coverage improvement. Simulation outputs display the progress in transmission delays, throughput, and effective packet delivery for disaster management.