Self-supported congestion-aware networking for emergency services in WANETs

One of the challenging issues for supporting emergency services in wireless ad hoc networks (WANETs) is coordinating the network under emergency situations. It may lead to inefficient use of the network resources by increasing congestion, as well as affect the network connectivity due to the non-cooperation behaviors of some selfish users. In this paper, we focus on promoting self-supported and congestion-aware networking for emergency services in WANETs based on the idea of Do-It-Yourself¹. We model network congestion and non-cooperation behaviors according to the relations between nodes in the constructed dependency graph. Then we propose an energy-efficient and congestion-aware routing protocol for the emergency services of WANETs. Based on the proposed model and routing protocol, we design two novel movement schemes, called Direct Movement to potential selfish/busy Relays (DMR) scheme and Iterative Movement to potential selfish/busy Relays (IMR) scheme for urgent sources to support themselves and to avoid congestion and non-cooperation. Analysis and simulation results show that our approaches significantly achieve better network performance and typically satisfy the requirements for emergency services in WANETs.