Self-supported cooperative networking for emergency services in multi-hop wireless networks

One of the challenging issues for supporting emergency services in wireless networks is coordinating the network under emergent situations. Cooperative communication (CC) is a promising approach which can offer significant enhancements in multi-hop wireless networks. This paper investigates the potential issues in using this communication paradigm to support emergency services. We focus on promoting energy-efficient and congestion-aware cooperative networking for emergency services based on the idea of Do-It-Yourself. We propose a novel cross-layer design which jointly considers the problems of route selection in network layer, congestion and non-cooperation avoidance among multiple links in MAC layer under cooperative multi-hop wireless environments. We formulate the multi-hop cooperative flow routing and relay node selection process as an optimization problem. Based on the formulations and models, we propose a self-supported networking scheme including three novel components that make the solution procedure highly efficient. Analysis and simulation results show that our approaches significantly achieve better network performance and typically satisfy the requirements for emergency services in multi-hop wireless networks.