Peer to Peer Social Network for Disaster Recovery

Keeping people connected even in a severe condition when main parts of communication infrastructures are destroyed by disasters is essential to loss mitigation and emergency relief. It is hard, however, to quickly recover communication infrastructures due to many difficulties on available resources such as time, equipment, man-power and so forth. This paper proposes a practical solution thereby victims in the disaster areas can easily connect with each other to share their safety status via the means of a social network, namely the peer to peer social network for disaster recovery (P2PSNDR). The P2PSNDR is designed so that it can feasibly run on top of a mobile multihop ad hoc network established on demand utilizing the beacon stuffing mechanism. This approach does not require additional hardware such as network interface cards (NICs). Instead, it leverages the available WiFi NIC on the mobile devices to listen the data embedded in the beacon frames sent by the neighbor nodes. As nodes can deal with the received messages by appropriately forwarding messages to the intended destination, multihop communication is established extending the communication coverage. The feasibility of the proposed network has been validated via simulations with various scenarios. The results reveal that the network can work properly with maximum 250 nodes which is large enough for common disaster recovery situations.