Drones for Connectivity Support in Disaster Recovery

摘要

The drones are nowadays devices able to help human operators in a lot of fields, one of these regards the operations of rescue in disasters or emergency events. In these scenarios, the possibility of using in a rapid way a fleet of drones which can be deployed rapidly and are able to cover a particular disaster area and provide connectivity has high importance. This importance regards the possibility for the drones of permitting the communications between the operators that, otherwise, could have serious difficulties because the current communication technologies heavily rely on the backbone network and the failure of base stations (BSs) due to natural disasters causes communication difficulties for public-safety and emergency communications. The contribution of this work is to explore the use of drones for providing safety communications during natural disasters, where part of the communication infrastructure becomes damaged and dysfunctional. We introduce in the system a human mobility model for disaster events in order to take into account the behavior of the people that in these situations has to move in the area full of obstacles created by the considered disaster. The human mobility affects how to provide connectivity in the area where it is possible to have part of the area most crowded than other. So, the drone that covers this particular region has an overload of traffic and, then it is opportune to redirect the traffic flow in order to guarantee the communication between the operators' devices inside the disaster area.