Geographic rendezvous-based architectures for emergency data dissemination

Communication and information dissemination in times of disasters could have a critical role in aiding the emergency personnel and saving lives. Unfortunately, regular communication becomes more challenging at these times, as the infrastructure might be damaged or overloaded, and the requirements for communication (e.g., response time, capacity) becomes highly critical. Ad-hoc networks forming between wireless devices have always been considered as a promising technology at disaster recovery situations. In this paper, we examine the need for efficient and robust information dissemination mechanisms on top of infrastructure-less ad-hoc networks. We argue that distributed rendezvous-based approaches are more promising for emergency data dissemination than approaches based on network flooding or centralized storage. We present the design of a geographic rendezvous-based architecture and evaluate its performance in detail against other variants and traditional approaches. The study shows its efficiency, high success rate in delivering data, and its robustness to failures and mobility; characteristics highly valuable at emergency situations. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.