Publication Date

Spring 2018

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Engineering

Advisor

Younghee Park

Keywords

Density-based clustering, Emergency communication networks, Software-defined networking, Software-defined wireless mesh networks, Unmanned aerial vehicles, Wireless mesh networks

Subject Areas

Computer engineering

Abstract

Natural disasters and other emergency situations have the potential to destroy a whole network infrastructure needed for communication critical to emergency rescue, evacuation, and initial rehabilitation. Hence, the research community has begun to focus attention on rapid network reconstruction in such emergencies; however, research has tried to create or improve emergency response systems using traditional radio and satellite communications, which face high operation costs and frequent disruptions. This thesis proposes a centralized monitoring and control system to reconstruct ad-hoc networks in emergencies by using software-defined wireless mesh networks (SDWMN). The proposed framework utilizes wireless mesh networks and software-defined networking to provide real-time network monitoring services to restore Internet access in a targeted disaster zone. It dispatches mobile devices including unmanned aerial vehicles and self-driving cars to the most efficient location aggregation to recover impaired network connections by using a new GPS position finder (GPS-PF) algorithm. The algorithm is based on density-based spatial clustering that calculates the best position to deploy one of the mobile devices. The proposed system is evaluated using the common open research emulator to demonstrate its efficiency and high accessibility in emergency situations. The results obtained from the evaluation show that the performance of the emergency communication system is improved considerably with the incorporation of the framework.

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