Emergency Route Selection for D2D Cellular Communications During an Urban Terrorist Attack

TL;DR

This paper investigates dynamic multi-hop route selection for D2D communications in urban environments during network congestion caused by emergencies, analyzing routing strategies and environmental factors affecting success rates.

Contribution

It introduces and compares different D2D routing algorithms under emergency scenarios, considering interference, urban obstacles, and user density impacts.

Findings

D2D success probability can reach 91% over 1 km with moderate user density.

Different routing strategies are optimal under varying outage constraints.

Urban building materials significantly affect D2D relaying feasibility.

Abstract

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is a technology that allows mobile users to relay information to each other, without access to the cellular network. In this paper, we consider how to dynamically select multi-hop routes for D2D communications in spectrum co-existence with a fully loaded cellular network. The modelling scenario is that of a real urban environment, when the cellular network is congested during an unexpected event, such as a terrorist attack. We use D2D to relay data across the urban terrain, in the presence of conventional cellular (CC) communications. We consider different wireless routing algorithms, namely: shortest-path-routing (SPR), interference-aware-routing (IAR), and broadcast-routing (BR). In general, there is a fundamental trade-off between D2D and CC outage performances, due to their mutual interference relationship. For different CC outage constraints and D2D end-to-end distances, the paper recommends different D2D routing strategies. The paper also considers the effects of varying user density and urban building material properties on overall D2D relaying feasibility. Over a distance of a kilometre, it was found that the success probability of D2D communications can reach 91% for a moderate participating user density (400 per square km) and a low wall penetration loss (<10dB).