A Cyber-Enabled Mission-Critical System for Post-Flood Response: Exploiting TV White Space as Network Backhaul Links

A crucial problem in post-flood recovery actions is the ability to rapidly establish communication and collaboration among rescuers to conduct timely and effective search and rescue (SAR) mission given disrupted telecommunication infrastructure to support the service. Aimed at providing such proximity service (ProSe) for mission-critical data exchange in the post-flood environment, the majority of existing solutions rely heavily upon ad-hoc networking approaches, which suffer from restricted communication range and the limited scope of interaction. As an effort to broaden the ProSe coverage and expand integrated global-local information exchange in the post-flood SAR activities, this paper proposes a novel network architecture in the form of a cyber-enabled mission-critical system (CEMCS) for acquiring and communicating post-flood emergency data by exploiting TV white space spectrum as network backhaul links. The primary method of developing the proposed system builds upon a layered architecture of wireless local, regional and wide-area communications, and incorporates collaborative network components among these layers. The desirable functionalities of CEMCS are showcased through formulation and the development of an efficient global search strategy exploiting a wide range of collaboration among network agents. The simulation results demonstrate the capability of CEMCS to provide ProSe in the post-flood scenarios as reflected by reliable network performance (e.g., packet delivery ratio nearing 80%-90%) and the optimality of efficient search algorithm.