WiMAX and WiFi network integration as backhaul on emergency communications

Damages caused by natural calamities are inevitable. Specifically, when telecommunications infrastructure gets damaged, exchange of information comes to halt. Information exchange is extremely vital in order to assess the number of fatalities. Emergency telecommunications network hence becomes important in the event of disaster recovery circumstances. WiMAX can be invoked as an alternative emergency network and can be used as backhaul. In this paper, we propose an approach to integrate WiMAX and WLAN Access Points to offer emergency communication services. Additionally, we have implemented VoIP services to assess the capabilities of the system. To evaluate the performance of the proposed appraoch, throughput, delay, jitter and packet loss under different scenarios have been considered as performance metrics. The measured values of throughput and delay are based on ITU-T G.114. From our study, we found that the system's performance could meet the minimum requirements, i.e., the system provides a minimum data rate of 64 kbps for G.711 with a maximum delay of 150 ms. Further, the packet loss is found to be less than 1%, which meets the standard requirement of packet loss when the traffic is varied from 0 Mbps to 1 Mbps for the entire scenarios considered. In order to validate system's performance measurement, we have tested the service quality EModel by transforming into MOS. Our investigation shows that the proposal presented herein is able to meet the recommended MOS value which is greater than 3 by the scenarios 1, 2 and 3 when traffic load is varied from 0 Mbps to 1 Mbps. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that for scenario 4, the required MOS value is obtained when the traffic loads are 0 Mbps, 1 Mbps and 2 Mbps.