Enabling disaster-resilient communication using multi-hop device-to-device framework

With the occurrence of a disaster, the conventional cellular network becomes non-functional. To provide connectivity to the affected users in such a scenario, we propose a novel multi-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication framework to connect to an active base station (BS). The goal of the proposed work is to maximize the number of covered users in the disaster-affected area within a given time frame. Joint routing and scheduling is imperative in a multi-hop network; however, the existing works on joint routing and scheduling optimization consider that the source-destination (user-BS) pairs are known beforehand or fixed. This is an inefficient approach when maximizing the number of covered users in a time-bounded communication set-up. Consequently, we propose a novel multi-hop D2D framework with joint source-destination pairing, routing and scheduling optimization. The optimization problem is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. Further, due to the high time complexity of ILP, a low complexity graph-based scheduling constraint aware routing and pairing algorithm is proposed, resulting in a significant reduction in processing time compared to the optimal solution. The proposed algorithm also outperforms shortest path routing based scheduling in terms of users covered in the disaster-affected area.

Automated summary

This study introduces a novel multi-hop device-to-device communication framework to connect to an active base station and maximize the number of covered users in a disaster-affected area within a given time frame. The proposed algorithm, formulated as an integer linear programming problem, offers a low complexity solution with significant reduction in processing time compared to the optimal solution. It outperforms traditional shortest path routing based scheduling in terms of coverage in disaster-affected areas.