Enabling disaster-resilient communication using multi-hop device-to-device framework

With the occurrence of a disaster, the conventional cellular network becomes non-functional. To provide connectivity to the affected users in such a scenario, we propose a novel multi-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication framework to connect to an active base station (BS). The goal of the proposed work is to maximize the number of covered users in the disaster-affected area within a given time frame. Joint routing and scheduling is imperative in a multi-hop network; however, the existing works on joint routing and scheduling optimization consider that the source–destination (user–BS) pairs are known beforehand or fixed. This is an inefficient approach when maximizing the number of covered users in a time-bounded communication set-up. Consequently, we propose a novel multi-hop D2D framework with joint source–destination pairing, routing and scheduling optimization. The optimization problem is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. Further, due to the high time complexity of ILP, a low complexity graph-based scheduling constraint aware routing and pairing algorithm is proposed, resulting in a significant reduction in processing time compared to the optimal solution. The proposed algorithm also outperforms shortest path routing based scheduling in terms of users covered in the disaster-affected area.