Disconnection of Internet access in case of natural disasters may cause serious obstacles for relief works. Immediately providing Internet connection in disaster regions is still a challenge because infrastructure-based networks may have been disabled by the disaster. This paper proposes a Group-based Internet Connection Spreading (GICS) architecture for disaster recovery. This architecture supports groups of unconnected mobile devices to connect to the Internet through still alive infrastructure access points or groups of Internet-connected mobile devices in an effective way. By the support of the Internet-connected Device Discovery mechanism in proposed GICS, mobile devices can discover nearby devices that have already reached the Internet connection. GICS enables mobile devices within groups collaborate together to bring reasonable Internet connection to all group members. Moreover, GICS can flexibly adapt with changes in network condition since GICS groups can necessarily rearrange the roles of group members to maintain the suitable the Internet connection. In addition, the quality of connection between devices in GICS is reliable based on IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standard.
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