Towards Enabling Multihop Wireless Local Area Networks for Disaster Communications

Abstract

xCalamities such as earthquakes and tsunami affect communication services by devastating the communication network and electrical infrastructure. Multihop relay networks can be deployed to restore the communication environment quickly in catastrophe-stricken areas. However, performance in terms of throughput is affected by deploying the relay networks. In wireless local area networks (WLANs), the primary purpose of multiband transmission employing multihop relay networks is to increase the throughput and reduce the latency. In the future, wireless networks are believed to carry high throughput, more data rates, and less latency by expanding bandwidth-demanding applications. Simultaneous multiband transmission in WLAN systems is considered to increase the coverage area without power escalation. Due to the inherent characteristics of different bands and channel conditions, transmission rates tend to be different. The impact of such conditions may cater to the disproportional distribution of data among bands, causing some of the bands to be overwhelmed, which incurs buffer overflow and packet loss. In contrast, the channel capacity of some of the bands remains underutilized. In this paper, we consider the channel conditions and transmission rates of each band on either side of the relay to address the problems mentioned above. Furthermore, this paper proposes a load distribution-based end-to-end traffic scheduling technique to improve system performance. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method with maximizing throughput and minimizing end-to-end delay.