An architecture for disaster recovery and search and rescue wireless networks

Disasters are exceptional events that are either man made, such as terrorist attacks, or natural, such as earthquakes, wildfires and floods. Disasters create emergency situations and cause physical and social disorder. In these emergency situations, food, water, shelter, protection and medical help are needed, and the effort needed to provide these basic services to the victims must be coordinated quickly via a reliable communication network. Disaster relief operation involves a sequence of steps including establishment of communication infrastructure, performing search and rescue operation, and providing any needed first aid services. Disaster networks can be classified as disaster mitigation networks and disaster relief networks. A disaster mitigation network is an infrastructure that is used in the pre-disaster stage to plan for effective post-disaster relief operation. A disaster recovery network (DRN), which is a part of a disaster relief operation, is used to provide emergency support to both the disaster victims and the crewmembers who are helping the victims, and to provide a communication infrastructure in the disaster affected area. The disaster relief operation also involves searching and locating the survivors, and then rescuing them. Data from previous disaster incidents indicate that more than 50% of deaths occurred within a few hours after the disaster event. Therefore, a disaster relief and search and rescue operation must take place within a short time after a disaster has occurred in order to increase the chances of rescuing the victims while they are still alive. Currently this process involves manual search in the disaster area, which generally has a shortage of crewmembers and, and which is also time consuming. In this thesis, a novel network architecture is proposed that enables survivors in a disaster area to report their locations to a Command Center (CC). The proposed Portable Disaster Recovery Network (PDRN) architecture provides communication network infrastructure for crewmember-to-crewmember, and survivor-to-CC (or crewmember) communication. The goal of PDRN architecture is to provide support for the crewmembers to rescue the survivors quickly from the disaster area. To achieve this goal in the PDRN architecture, PDRN phones are dropped at random points in the disaster area. These special low-cost phones produce continuous distinctive ring/beep until someone picks them up. The distinctive ring/beep is intended to attract the attention the wandering survivors in the disaster area, and the moment a survivor picks a phone up, his/her location is automatically known to the crewmembers at the onsite Command Center. The rescue team is then dispatched to rescue the survivor. Survivors' movements are analyzed using several existing random walk models and our proposed random walk models. Since the exact models are not easy to analyze, simulation solutions are obtained for several parameters of interest, particularly the mean first passage time, which is the mean time that elapses from the time that a survivor begins to search for a phone until he/she finds one.