UAV Assisted Disaster Management Using D2D Communications in Emergency Scenarios

Abstract

In Emergency situations, Public Safety (PS) networks play an important role in relief and rescue operations. These operations often require better coordination, higher situational awareness, lower response times, and higher efficiency. In such situations, Device-to-device (D2D) communications serves as an alternate to cellular networks to enable communication for public safety networks (PSNs). A key requirement for PSNs is to offer alternative access to reach the responders if the communication infrastructure is partially or completely damaged due to a natural or man-made disaster. Therefore, considering the deployment of both the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Mobile Command Center (MCC), investigate end to end connectivity of UEs to the MCC in terms of the outage. Specifically, various disaster aware clustering schemes are proposed that utilize the UAV and MCC position for the association. These schemes include multiple degrees of freedom to manage intra-cluster distances along with the flexibility to restructure the clusters. In addition, assume the provision of energy harvesting at Cluster Heads (CHs) through the UAV and MCC. We applied our proposed schemes on a real man-made disaster scenario layout and determined their efficacy. In addition, propose a novel UAV assisted solution to ensure energy efficient D2D