Opportunistic Alert Diffusion in Disaster Scenario - Stay Alive Longer !

International audienceOpportunistic communications present a promising solution as a disaster network recovery in emergency situations such as hurricanes, earthquakes and floods where infrastructure might be damaged. Recent works have proposed opportunistic-based alert diffusion approaches useful for trapped survivors. However, two main features were left behind. On the one hand, these works do not consider the assortment of networks integrated in mobile devices (e.g. WiFi-Direct, WiFi ad-hoc, cellular, bluetooth) and the choice of the network interface is left to the user who has no idea what is best or might be in a physical or psychological distress that impede the efficient selection. On the other hand, most of these works are based on selfish diffusion which might drain quickly the battery power. Moreover, they do not consider various energy level, which obviously influences the alert diffusion scheme. This paper proposes COPE, a cooperative opportunistic alert diffusion approach for disaster scenario that considers mobile devices that come with multiple network interfaces and with various battery power level. In order to maintain mobile devices alive longer, survivors form cliques and zones in which they diffuse alternately and periodically alert messages until reaching a potential rescuers team. Simulation results show that COPE largely outperforms the selfish diffusion scheme in terms of energy consumption while guaranteeing an important alert delivery success