ProDiP: PDF based dropbox deployment for improved performance of DTN placed for emergency situation handling in a smart city

With the recent endeavour of developing countries like India towards conceptualization of smart city coupled with the advancement of communication technologies have motivated researchers towards realization of the mission. Installation of sophisticated infrastructure is being planned to cater various smart services but planning to handle unwanted events like disaster has not received much attention as part of this smart city endeavour. Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) shows its useful applicability in emergency scenarios such as post disaster scenario. To increase contact opportunities in DTN in such a scenario, now-a-days strategy of deploying stationary nodes such as dropboxes (DBs), has been broadly accepted. In this paper, we propose such a dropbox placement scheme considering post disaster situation analysis in a smart city environment. Accordingly, we design one probability density function (PDF) based on the application's requirement which suggests that DBs to be deployed around the disaster event. In reality in a smart city the deployment may be preferably at road crossing points equipped with kiosks. The proposed PDF based placement scheme (ProDiP) deploys DBs based on the distance from the disaster event as well as on the number of merging paths at the crossing point. It prioritizes the crossing points as per the probability density values so that for a given number of available DBs same number of crossings are selected as per the descending priority values. ONE simulator is used to evaluate the comparative performance between the existing routing schemes in DTN with and without deploying DBs. We claim that the competing routing schemes with DBs achieve higher delivery ratio and lower message overhead compared to the routing schemes without DBs.