UrgentMesh: Wireless mesh networks with DVB-Satellite for emergency management

Reliable broadband communications are required during disaster recovery and emergency response operations, when infrastructure-based communications have been destroyed or are not available. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are multi-hop wireless networks with instant deployment, self-healing, self-organization and self-configuration features. These capabilities make WMNs a promising technology for incident and emergency communication. An incident area network must be dynamically deployed to provide efficient visual communications between the field, the head office and other locations. A Digital Video Broadcast-Satellite (DVB-S) system also requires moderate infrastructure between networks, making it suitable for use during disaster and emergency communication. In this paper, we propose UrgentMesh, which seamlessly integrates WMNs and DVB-S to assist wide-area rescue operations in disaster and emergency situations. UrgentMesh exploits the joint characteristics of WMNs and DVB-S to provide an effective way of delivering high-quality video between the head office and the rescue team in the field. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate and analyze the performance of the proposed integrated system in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss rate.