A novel multi-hop body-to-body routing protocol for disaster and emergency networks

In this paper, a new multi-hop routing protocol (called ORACE-Net) for disaster and emergency networks is proposed. The proposed hierarchical protocol creates an ad-hoc network through body-to-body (B2B) communication between rescue members and the command center. The on-body coordinators establish forward routes towards a command center, whereas, the command center builds reverse routes towards these nodes. The Routing tables are optimized based on real-time end-to-end Link Quality Estimation (LQE) metrics (i.e., end-to-end signal strength level and end-to-end hop count). We evaluate our proposed protocol with other widely used protocols in the disaster context which are covered by the routing classes (i.e., Reactive, Proactive and Geographic-based). The evaluation is based on a realistic disaster mobility trace. The results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the other studied protocols in terms of packet reception rate and energy consumption. The proposed ORACE-Net protocol increases the body-to-body network lifetime and reliability.