Recovery and Optimization of Post-Disaster Cellular Networks

Disaster recovery for cellular communications is needed to assure the transfer of safety information for better crisis mitigation. A framework for leveraging the combination of electrical microgrids and cellular networks to provide postdisaster local cellular service was proposed in [1]. In this paper, building on [1] we develop an algorithm for dynamically reconfiguring surviving base stations (SBSs) powered by a microgrid to form a multi-hop mesh network that provides local cellular service. The mesh network is formed by pooling the available spectrum bands and reallocating the spectrum for inter BS-links and intra-links between a BS and its users. An optimization model of the spectrum allocation and BS power assignment is formulated with the goal of maximum average throughput per cell while satisfying the traffic demand and QoS constraints. Numerical results for a heterogeneous LTE network are given illustrating the performance of the proposed approach.