2-2 Ad hoc based emergency communications models for wide-scale disaster management

In case of disasters, telecommunication infrastructure might be destroyed rising the demand of fast-deployment emergency wireless communication systems in order to provide communication services to victims and rescue teams. Recently, mobile ad hoc communications is considered as an efficient solution for emergency communications in disaster areas. Beside the advantages in terms of fast deployment and self-configuration capability, ad hoc communications networks show less performance in large scale networks. In this paper, we first discuss some proposed ad hoc based emergency communications models for wide scale disaster management. Then we present a hybrid system model of wireless data networks for emergency communications in disaster areas. Due to limited radio resource, resource management plays an important role to system performance and provide user's QoS. We propose a resource management scheme for the hybrid wireless networks in which selected powerful end users operate as temporary relay hosts (TRH) in order to utilize the system resource efficiently. The scheme combines network controlled handover, resource allocation and admission control and takes advantages of adaptive transmission rates and multi-hop/relay communication mode. Performance results obtained by computer simulation show that using the proposed resource management scheme can reduce the connection blocking probability i.e. increase the quantity of simultaneous connections.