Behavior of Wireless Body-to-Body Networks Routing Strategies for Public Protection and Disaster Relief

TL;DR

This paper evaluates multi-hop routing protocols and wireless technologies for wireless body-to-body networks in emergency scenarios, highlighting WiFi IEEE 802.11's superior packet reception and energy efficiency, and WBAN IEEE 802.15.6's lower delay.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of routing protocols and wireless technologies for tactical ad-hoc networks in critical and disaster relief operations.

Findings

WiFi IEEE 802.11 offers the best packet reception rate and energy consumption.

WBAN IEEE 802.15.6 achieves the lowest delay among tested technologies.

Geographical routing with WiFi performs best with location info, while gradient-based routing with WBAN is optimal without it.

Abstract

Critical and public safety operations require real-time data transfer from the incident area(s) to the distant operations command center going through the evacuation and medical support areas. Any delay in communication may cause significant loss. In some cases, it is anticipated that the existing communication infrastructures can be damaged or out-of-service. It is thus required to deploy tactical ad-hoc networks to cover the operation zones. Routing data over the deployed network is a significant challenge with consideration to the operations conditions. In this paper we evaluate the performance of mutli-hop routing protocols while using different wireless technologies in an urban critical and emergency scenario. Using a realistic mobility model, Mobile Ad hoc, geographic based and data-centric routing protocols are evaluated with different communication technologies (i.e. WiFi IEEE 802.11; WSN IEEE 802.15.4; WBAN IEEE 802.15.6). It is concluded that, WiFi IEEE 802.11 is the best wireless technology with consideration to the packet reception rate and the energy consumption. Whereas, in terms of delay, WBAN IEEE 802.15.6 is the most efficient. With regards to the routing protocols, assuming that the location information is available, geographical based routing protocol with WiFi IEEE 802.11 performed much better compared to the others routing protocols. In case where the location information is unavailable, gradient based routing protocol with WBAN IEEE 802.15.6 seems the best combination.