A novel information diffusing method with virtual cells based Wi-Fi direct in disaster area networks

Recently, Wi-Fi Direct (WFD) enabled mobile Device-to-Device (D2D) communication emerged as a promising technique to carry out communication in disaster affected areas by exploiting its ability to operate without existing communication infrastructures. However, existing methods utilizing WFD randomly select communication partners, and therefore, are not effective in diffusing safety information pertaining to disaster victims over a wide coverage area. We address this issue in this paper, and propose a novel and efficient information diffusion method exploiting WFD by designing special virtual cells comprising the location information of the mobile devices. Our designed virtual cell enables information diffusion by allocating the same time to multiple areas without interference. We also evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method through computer-based simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the scheduling control of our proposal outperforms those of the conventional methods.