Abstract
Floods, earthquakes, storm surges and other natural disasters severely affect the communication infrastructure and thus compromise the effectiveness of communications dependent rescue and warning services. In this paper, a user centric approach is proposed to establish communications in disaster affected and communication outage areas. The proposed scheme forms ad hoc clusters to facilitate emergency communications and connect end-users/ User Equipment (UE) to the core network. A novel cluster formation with single and multi-hop communication framework is proposed. The overall throughput in the formed clusters is maximized using convex optimization. In addition, an intelligent system is designed to label different clusters and their localities into affected and non-affected areas. As a proof of concept, the labeling is achieved on flooding dataset where region specific social media information is used in proposed machine learning techniques to classify the disaster-prone areas as flooded or unflooded. The suitable results of the proposed machine learning schemes suggest its use along with proposed clustering techniques to revive communications in disaster affected areas and to classify the impact of disaster for different locations in disaster-prone areas.
•A user centric approach is proposed to establish communications in disaster affected and communication outage areas.•A novel cluster formation along with single and multi-hop communications is also proposed.•Convex optimization is implemented to maximize the system throughput.•An intelligent system is designed to label different clusters and thus their localities into affected and non-affected areas.•Labeling is achieved on flooding dataset where localized social media information is used along with machine learning techniques to classify the disaster-prone areas as flooded or unflooded.