Quality of sustainability optimization design for mobile ad hoc networks in disaster areas

Abstract

During a disaster, communication systems are partially (or completely) interrupted with very limited resources due to infrastructures destruction and hence the lack of essential services. Meanwhile, the demand for communication reaches its highest peak ever since users need to contact loved ones and make sure they are safe, inform first responders and local governments about surrounding conditions, and receive urgent instructions for safety and resilience. Rather than only high quality of service (QoS), the affected users now require high quality of sustainability (QoSus) of communications that are characterized by high response, interoperable and robust connections, high hit rate and delivery capacity of contents, and resource savings. In this paper, we therefore design a QoSuS model for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) to reduce as much harm as possible when a disaster strikes. To this end, we propose optimization problems that we solve for high QoSus of MANET in three-tier cellular networks (i.e., macrocells, femtocells, and mobile devices). Our optimal results include a number of replicas of each cached content, a set of femtocells to cache the replicas, a set of cellular users to share their sub-channels with other mobile devices, and a set of relay nodes for mobile device-to-device communications. We further take into account the constraints of co-channel interference due to many simultaneous channel accesses, storage resource of femtocells, and energy resource of mobile devices, to efficiently gain high performance of solution. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed solutions provide the best possible QoSus under such severe conditions. 2015 IEEE.