Smart Traffic Offloading with Mobile Edge Computing for Disaster-Resilient Communication Networks

When a large-scale natural disaster happens, the evolved node B (eNB) of the disaster area (DA) may be destroyed, and the core network (CN) may be congested with massive data traffic. A disaster-resilient communication system can help relief workers execute the rescue operation. In this paper, we propose a smart traffic offloading mechanism (STOM) on a vehicular eNB (VeNB) to improve the system throughput and delay of the disaster-resilient communication system with heavy CN congestion. Based on the concept of mobile edge computing, the proposed STOM can redirect the traffic flows of relief workers in the same DA to prevent the local data from entering the CN. Therefore, traffic flows between relief workers in the same DA can be transmitted directly through the VeNB only, and system throughput and transmission delay can be significantly improved. Simulation results show that our proposed STOM can achieve 2277% higher system throughput and significantly improve the delay performance, compared with the disaster-resilient communication system without STOM under the worst-case CN congestion environment.