Resilient device-to-device communication in emergency situations

Maintaining communication among the population, during and in the aftermath of disasters, is key to the success of both response and recovery efforts. Evidently, the telecommunications infrastructure most often fails in these situations and thus adhoc solutions ought to be devised. However, unlike customary adhoc solutions that focus on the traditional end-to-end communication paradigm, in emergency situations there is no clear distinction on the source-destination pair. This work proposes an intelligent alert dissemination strategy (ADS) for emergency adhoc networks whereby alerts are forwarded in such a way that improves their detectability, while increasing their longevity. Performance evaluation of ADS via simulation and actual implementation demonstrated the scalability, as well as the great energy efficiency gains achieved when operating the proposed solution in emergency scenarios.