Abstract
Disaster management is a complex and interesting domain which deals with abnormal, extremely critical and challenging situations. It has always been a worldwide concern and considered one of the leading causes of death and injuries around the world. During disasters, continuous connectivity plays a vital role in rescue operations. However, maintaining stable and continuous connectivity in disasters is unguaranteed because of the possible failure of infrastructure network caused by disasters. Hence depending on disaster management systems that are built on infrastructure networks is impractical and unfeasible. Utilizing alternative solutions like mobile Ad-hoc networks may substitute the infrastructure network. In this paper, we utilize WiFi direct technology which is known for its superiority over other similar ad-hoc network technologies to develop a disaster management system. The System is specifically developed to provide a stable communication channel between victims and rescuers. Additionally, we propose an optimization to WiFi direct network to enable the inter-group communication between different WiFi direct groups using WiFi legacy. Using this hybrid solution of the two technologies (WiFi legacy and WiFi Direct), we developed an android disaster management system that is more robust and resilient to damage. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves improvement in terms of energy consumption, delay and reliability comparing to existing works.