Multi-Hop D2D Framework for Disaster-Resilient Communication Network

This paper presents a disaster-resilient communication network that utilizes multi-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication to connect to active base stations (BSs) outside a disaster-affected area for potential application in fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks. We propose a novel multi-hop D2D framework where user-BS (source-destination) pairing are optimized jointly with routing and scheduling to maximize the number of covered users in the disaster-affected area within a given time frame. The optimization problem is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. Further, due to the high time complexity of ILP, a low complexity graph-based scheduling constraint aware routing and pairing (SCARP) algorithm is proposed that results in a significant reduction in processing time as compared to the optimal solution. The proposed algorithm also outperforms shortest path routing (SPR) based scheduling and pairing in terms of users covered in the disaster-affected area.