Take it or Leave it: Decentralized Resource Allocation in Mobile Networks

Human activity patterns such as communication and cooperation rely in large parts on smartphone-based interaction. Day-to-day available communication means are taken for granted. But in scenarios where communication infrastructure is broken, such as in the aftermath of a disaster, communication establishment becomes crucial. In those post-disaster conditions ubiquitous mobile devices carried by humans can be used to establish basic ad-hoc communication services in order to aid first responders or to organize volunteers. However, these services rely heavily on the runtime of the utilized mobile devices and therefore network failure and communication capability show a strong dependency on the lifetime of mobile devices. In this paper, the potentials of decentralized resource allocation strategies in mobile networks, with harsh post-disaster conditions, are examined. Considering energy resources to prolong functioning of basic post disaster communication services, different resource allocation strategies are proposed. Through an extensive simulation study we show that (i) the proposed strategies for resource allocation lead to significant improvement of the lifetime of the mobile devices (up to 7.8%) and (ii) the time in which a stable service quality (w.r.t. to the received messages) is provided can be extended by 80% compared to the baseline.