Supporting Emergency Service by Retasking Delay-Tolerant Network Architecture

Emergency communication in heterogeneous networks with fragile connectivity is a challenging task. Emergency delay-tolerant network (EDTN) is a new network architecture based on the concept of delay tolerant networks (DTNs) to provide emergency service. However, existing transport protocols like TCP are not suitable to provide emergency service well with instable bandwidth and connectivity, because EDTN use opportunistic forwarding to achieve end-to-end communication. The paper proposes a hybrid layered network architecture for EDTN based on cluster classification without infrastructure. Especial investigation in the network model by introducing the data layer and control layer is also brought forward, which presents the various DTNs nodes and layer information interactions based on session initiation protocol (SIP). Moreover, we have extended the usage of EDTN in next generation network, which leads to the insights for the future theoretic study and project design.