Efficient DropBox Deployment toward Improving Post-Disaster Information Exchange in a Smart City

In the face of a disaster, the already installed gadgets in a smart city can be leveraged to gather post-disaster situational information. However, owing to the typical disruption of cellular and Internet connectivity during disasters, the possibility of transmitting situational information using conventional communication infrastructure is almost ruled out. The networking research community has strongly proposed the use of delay tolerant networks (DTN) in such challenged network scenario. In this article, we exploit the movement of volunteers carrying smartphones in such a scenario to form a DTN and propose a utility-based DropBox deployment scheme toward improving post-disaster situational information exchange. In this scheme, DropBoxes are deployed across the network at high utility locations. Since the effectiveness of the proposed scheme can be evaluated accurately considering an appropriate post-disaster mobility model suitable for smart cities, we present a human movement model for a post-disaster scenario in a smart city. This movement model is shown to have better performance over other competing movement models in a post-disaster smart city environment. An extensive simulation is performed using ONE simulator to evaluate the comparative performance of the proposed DropBox deployment scheme with some state-of-the-art existing deployment schemes using the presented movement model. Simulation results justify the proposed DropBox deployment scheme improves network performances in terms of delivery ratio, overhead ratio, and average residual energy at the cost of tolerable latency.