Impact of Traffic and Mobility Patterns on Network Performance in Disaster Scenarios

First responders show specific movement and traffic patterns that are closely related to their current task during a disaster relief mission. In order to develop efficient communication systems both aspects should be considered. This is important especially if Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) are used, because they are exploiting the mobility of the nodes in order to deliver messages in scenarios with intermittent connectivity. In a disaster scenario, such a network is formed by the communication equipment of first responders. In this paper, we evaluate different mobility models and traffic generation options and show their impact on the performance of the epidemic routing protocol. Our results show that the correlation between traffic and mobility in disaster scenarios has a significant impact on the delivery ratio and experienced delay, respectively