Ad Hoc Routing for Rural Public Safety
R. S. Wolff, Jian Tang, Douglas E. Galarus, David J. Larson · 2008
Mobile Ad-Hoc Networking (MANET) technology shows promise for application to public safety data communication in both urban and rural areas. While the challenges are arguably greater in rural areas, particularly in regard to lack of infrastructure, MANET should be considered as a technology applied to assist in overcoming these challenges. For instance, in a situation in which backbone access is limited, MANET could be used to share and extend connectivity throughout the scene of an incident. In a situation in which backbone access is not available at all, MANET could be used to provide data communication within an incident, in the absence of infrastructure. In this study, researchers investigated how MANET could be applied to rural public safety. By engaging public safety officials as primary stakeholders throughout the study, the project team made a best effort to ensure that real needs would be documented, and associated requirements would be elicited to serve as necessary performance benchmarks. Five scenarios were derived, based on actual events and stakeholder input, to serve as a representative test-suite under which MANET could be applied and tested. Scenarios were documented thoroughly to provide a basis for realistic incidents and situations. MANET technology was then assumed for application to subsets of these scenarios. Several popular ad-hoc routing protocols, AODV and DSR, were tested within scenarios and against each other using OPNET. DSR was extended to support Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, resulting in a new protocol named QASR. In nearly all cases, QASR outperformed AODV and DSR, and demonstrated that QoS requirements could be satisfied in certain rural public safety applications. Obviously this result is dependent on network density, technology used (including frequency choice), and general bandwidth requirements. A demonstration of MANET technology was conducted for Wyoming public safety officials to show its potential application. Wyoming’s Wind River Canyon was selected as the site for the demonstration since it is remote and prone to incidents. A simulated landslide was used as an incident for which MANET technology could be used to track responder locations, to share photographs and video, and to facilitate whiteboard-based collaboration. In addition, a mobile command post was simulated to provide wide-area network connectivity to nodes local to the incident. The results of this study demonstrate the potential for application of MANET to rural public safety. While the technology is not applicable in all situations, sufficient promise was shown to merit further related research and development.