Our society is highly dependent on mobile communications. However, coverage to mobile devices may be inadequate in a variety of infrastructure and outage circumstances. In particular, in disaster scenarios both victims and rescuers need network access to the outside world to aid in the search and rescue operation, while local wireless infrastructures may have been damaged. A hybrid mobile ad hoc network can be used to address this coverage problem without modifications to the existing wireless infrastructure. In this approach, a number of members called gateway nodes have connections to network infrastructure, capable of relaying data/information to destinations off of the MANET. In this paper, we seek to improve the design of hybrid mobile ad hoc networks for extending wireless coverage in disaster search and rescue scenarios through the use of self-organized context-aware data forwarding, which utilizes the location and mobility context of mobile devices inferred from their built-in sensors to improve the performance. We are building an Android application testbed that implements the hybrid MANET across a number of mobile devices to assess different design choices. We also plan to perform analytical modeling and numerical simulations to evaluate this hybrid system on extending wireless coverage in disaster scenarios.
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