Crowdsourcing-based architecture for post-disaster geolocation: A comparative performance evaluation

In the aftermath of a natural or industrial disaster, locating individuals is crucial. However, disasters can cause extensive damage to the network infrastructures and a generalized loss of communication among survivors. In this article, we present a network support solution that provides a post-disaster geolocation-collecting service that relies on inter mobile device connections. On top of this dynamically built network, survivors' mobile devices exchange information about geolocation of others they have encountered. Such information is routed towards predefined data collection centers using either the DTN Epidemic or Spray and Wait DTN protocol. Experiments were conducted on the ONE simulator and performance evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of our proposal.