Abstract: When disasters strike, communications, coordination, and information sharing among the first responders and emergency personnel become critical to the success and efficiency of relief operations, including response and recovery. This article explores the ecosystem of disaster relief operations in three dimensions within the public safety domain – communications, information sharing, and decision-making - in order to build a solution that will significantly enhance relief operations that take place on the ground immediately after a disaster strikes. It also explores the underlying processes and their interrelationships and identifies strategies for enhanced first responder coordination and response.

Abstract: Device-to-device (D2D) can be a key paradigm to design Pervasive Public safety Networks (PPNs) which could allow the User Equipments (UEs) to communicate directly in disaster scenarios. Recently, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been suggested in PSNs to enhance situational awareness and disseminate critical information to the deployed Base Station (BS) by providing reliable connectivity. In this paper, we are interested in direct discovery, one of the functions provided by Proximity Services (ProSe). We consider a disaster situation when no core network is available and transmit the discovery message over UAV-to-UE link. Simulation results are presented and discussed based on the root-MUSIC algorithm to locate the affected UE assisted by UAV, achieving a ca.one meter accuracy at over 200 m. Furthermore, we analyse the performance of the link by calculating Packet Error Ratio (PER) and throughput, achieving up to 11 Mbps.

Abstract: A QoS routing to select the best paths among Drones supporting incoming calls and multimedia traffic in emergency or critical situations is proposed. In situations where drones teams are requested to cover areas and mobile users can need to communicate under the absence of network infrastructure a self-organized on-the fly network can become an essential element. Cooperating with a critical network infrastructure, deploying a QoS aware path selection strategy supporting QoS requests and multimedia traffic such as VoIP and Video traffic can become a key issue to face. In this paper, a bio-inspired strategy to maintain the drones’ network topology in a ligthway manner is proposed. Two metrics considered in a joint unified metric are proposed in order to balance load traffic and, at the same time, select the shortest routes. A comparison with an enhanced Link-State (LS) routing has been performed where the minimum hop count metric has been considered together to a LS routing with maximum available bandwidth metric. Performance evaluation has been evaluated in terms of control overhead, number or admitted calls, average bandwidth utilization.

Abstract: UAVs are increasingly being employed to carry out surveillance, parcel delivery, communication-support and other specific tasks. In certain cases, the same geographical area may be in need of multiple services, which can be carried out by the same drones. In this paper, we propose and investigate a joint planning of multitask missions leveraging a fleet of UAVs equipped with a standard set of accessories enabling heterogeneous tasks. To this end, an optimization problem is formulated yielding the optimal joint planning and deriving the resulting quality of the delivered tasks. In addition, a heuristic solution is developed for large-scale environments to cope with the increased complexity of the optimization framework. The developed joint planning of multitask missions is applied to a specific post-disaster recovery scenario of a flooding in the San Francisco area. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed solutions and the potential savings in the number of UAVs needed to carry out all the tasks with the required level of quality.