DTN Based MANET for Disaster Information Transport by Smart Devices

In Japan, large scale earthquakes frequently occur. At the occurrence of disaster, network infrastructure is often seriously damaged and traffic congestion occurs. Particularly since the network communication environments of mountain areas are not well developed, it is difficulty to normally use the communication means once the disaster happened. We have investigated the network communication method which can use in the case disasters, and developed Never Die Network (NDN) [1] based on Software Defined Network (SDN) to realize as a disaster network. In NDN, each SDN switch monitors network performance from the network module. If NDN switch detects network failure or performance degradation, then the NDN Controller switches to the other network. NDN is valid as a network communication infrastructure at part of disaster area. Conversely, Delay / Disruptions Tolerant Network (DTN) can realize mobile devices communication without constructing infrastructure. DTN is effective at the time of disaster as mobile adhoc network (MANET), but more efficient routing and battery utilization have to be considered. In this paper, we propose a DTN based mobile adhoc network for temporal network in the case of disaster and considered transfer disruption and transfer delay. We constructed an experimental prototype by smart devices and evaluated its performance to verify the advantages of our suggested system.