Fuzzy-logic-based data-differentiated service supported routing protocol for emergency communication networks in underground mines

Hybrid wireless mesh networks are suitable to construct emergency communication networks after disasters in underground mines. The routing decision in emergency scene is more difficult to give an accurate mathematical description due to the constraints of various data types, different data transmission requirements, and multi-parameters. Based on the fuzzy decision theory, this article has proposed a fuzzy-logic-based data-differentiated service supported routing protocol. Through the use of the adaptive fuzzy decision system, fuzzy-logic-based data-differentiated service supported routing protocol can provide data-differentiated services and make optimized routing decisions to satisfy the transmission requirements of different data types. In addition, a path soft handoff strategy has been proposed to maintain continuous data transmission when the path quality deteriorates. Based on NS2, we set three transmission scenarios (transmitting emergency data, regular data, or mixed data) to test the performances of fuzzy-logic-based data-differentiated service supported routing protocol, ad hoc on-demand distance vector, FUZZY-ad hoc on-demand distance vector, and multi-criteria routing metric. The results show that the fuzzy-logic-based data-differentiated service supported routing protocol has a higher delivery ratio and lower end-to-end delay when transmitting emergency data. When transmitting regular data, fuzzy-logic-based data-differentiated service supported routing protocol has achieved higher throughput and longer network lifetime than that of similar algorithms.