ORACE-Net: A novel multi-hop body-to-body routing protocol for public safety networks

With the growing increase of disasters worldwide, in terms of frequencies, intensities and unpredictability, there is currently a growing need for novel ubiquitous communication systems enabling public safety networks (PSN). Disaster operations require real-time and low latency data communication, in live video and audio streaming, as well as in integration with social networks. In this context, existing network infrastructures might be either damaged or overloaded. Thus, it is expected that wireless Body-to-Body Networks (B2Bs) could play a key role in setting-up tactical PSN deployments enabling effective and reliable disaster response and management. In addition to the challenges with radio technologies and their inter-operability, coexistence and energy consumption issues, routing is also an important and critical challenge for the PSN. In this paper we propose a novel wireless B2B routing protocol, called "Optimized Routing Approach for Critical and Emergency Networks (ORACE-Net)" to enhance routing performance in disaster relief. ORACE-Net aims to exploit dynamic B2B communications between wearable networks to establish and maintain a mobile dynamic communication backbone. Analytical evaluations are conducted to analyze the communication overheads of ORACE-Net in comparison to existing routing standards, including Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector version 2 (AODVv2), Optimized Link State Routing Protocol version 2 (OLSRv2) and Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR). Extensive simulations are then performed under realistic assumptions and synthetic mobility models, and show that ORACE-Net outperforms conventional routing approaches in terms of packet reception rate, energy consumption and fairly performed in terms of delay compared to the other approaches.