Joint epidemic control and routing in mass gathering areas using Body-to-Body Networks

Body-to-Body Networks (BBNs) have recently gained momentum as a revolutionary technology for the monitoring of people behavior with real-time updates of medical records and interactive assistance in emergency situations, like the spread of pandemic diseases. This paper investigates the epidemic control issue in mass gathering areas (i.e., the airports) from a practical point of view by using BBNs and by adopting some key features from existing epidemiology models. We first introduce a BBN-based epidemic control framework. Second, we define an Epidemic-aware Routing Metric and then propose a Location-Aided Routing protocol tailored to BBNs, called BB-LAR, along with an epidemic control mechanism, in order to exchange epidemic data and help the authority control unit in detecting and quarantining the infected subjects. Finally, we evaluate the performance of BB-LAR with respect to existing routing schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and energy consumption.