Performance Evaluation of Delay Tolerant Network Protocols to Improve Nepal Earthquake Rescue Communications

TL;DR

This study evaluates the performance of Delay Tolerant Network protocols in Nepal earthquake rescue scenarios, highlighting their effectiveness and trade-offs in disaster communication environments.

Contribution

It introduces a realistic Nepal earthquake rescue use case for benchmarking DTN routing protocols and analyzes their performance with various network parameters.

Findings

Distributed DTN methods improve rescue communication reliability.

Trade-offs exist between transmission success and resource use.

Routing protocol performance varies with buffer sizes.

Abstract

In the fields of disaster rescue and communication in extreme environments, Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) has become an important technology due to its "store-carry-forward" mechanism. Selecting the appropriate routing strategy is of crucial significance for improving the success rate of distress message transmission and reducing delays in material dispatch. We design a pseudo realistic use case of Nepal Kathmandu earthquake rescue based on dynamically changing population distribution model and characteristics of rescue activities in the initial rescue efforts in Nepal Kathmandu earthquakes to conducted the multi criteria two benchmark routing protocols performance analysis in the face of different buffer sizes of the rescue team nodes. We identify multiple real world node groups, including affected residents, rescue teams, drones and ground vehicles and communication models are established according to the movement behaviors of these groups. We analyze the communication of distress messages between edge nodes to obtain performance metrics such as delivered probability, average delay, hop count, and buffer time. By analyzing the multi layer complex data and protocols differences, the research results show the effectiveness of distributed DTN communication methods in the Nepal earthquake rescue use case, reveal existence of trade-offs between transmission reliability and resource utilization of different routing protocols in disaster communication environment and provide a basis for the design of next-generation emergency communication services based on edge nodes.