A Comparative Study on Communication Protocols in Disaster Areas with Virtual Disaster Simulation Systems

In this paper, we describe a comparative study on communication protocols based on ad-hoc network technologies in disaster situations. In disaster situations, mobility and density of persons are different from those in usual situations. Thus, in order to evaluate communication protocols, we propose a virtual disaster simulation system. In this simulation system, virtual disaster areas are constructed based on hazard maps which are provided for predicting damage of disaster. Virtual disaster areas enables us to conduct experiments for communication systems effectively since we cannot conduct experiments in real disaster situations. By using this simulation system, we compare three protocols from the viewpoints of data gathering performance and power consumption. Experimental results show that our proposed ad-hoc unicursal protocol shows good performance with respect to both viewpoints in disaster situations.