Vehicle-assist resilient information and network system for disaster management

After big disasters, a damaged area can be out of contact because of severe damage of existing network infrastructures. Meanwhile, high demands for network connections to the disaster area will arise to collect damage information and disseminate rescue instructions. In this paper, we design a vehicle-assist resilient information and network system for disaster management, despite of the Internet unavailability. It contains three main components: (1) smartphone apps that provide functions of SOS reporting, life and medical resources request/provision, and safe road navigation; (2) mobile stations that assist data exchange between smartphone apps and servers; (3) geo-distributed servers that collect user data, conduct distributed data analysis, and make disaster management decisions. Since the vehicle-assist network is critical to connect isolated smartphones and servers, we continue to study the scheduling problem of mobile stations. Given a number of disaster management tasks, such as sensing, information collection, and message dissemination, we propose online algorithms that schedules mobile stations for disaster management tasks with the objective of maximizing the total weight of finished tasks, without any knowledge of future task arrivals. We derive the competitive ratio of our proposed algorithms and conduct extensive simulations for performance evaluation.