Emergency Management in Smart Cities: Infrastructure-Less Communication Systems

Abstract

Reliable communication is a critical component of a successful emergency management operation in resilient cities. However, large-scale extreme events may demolish telecommunication infrastructure. The current state of practice to maintain communication when telecom infrastructure are not available heavily depend on expensive equipment (e.g., transportable telecom towers and unmanned aerial networks) that may not be readily available everywhere. To address this issue, this study aims to develop theoretical foundations for a new framework that provides a fully decentralized infrastructure-less communication system using ad hoc mobile networks. The proposed framework uses device-to-device (D2D) wireless connection, distributed ledgers adopted from Blockchain technology, and a new all-to-all network broadcasting algorithm. The proposed infrastructure-less system collects critical spatial data from available cellphone devices in the affected area and shares it among all of them. At the end of this procedure, each device will have spatial information of all available devices. When emergency teams find a device through a D2D connection, they will actually have access to spatial data of all devices and can locate all people in one step.