Improving Response Time for Crowd Management in Hajj

Abstract

Flying Adhoc Network (FANET) is a particular type of Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) that consists of flying drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). MANETs are especially useful in rural and remote areas, where the lack of public networks necessitates data delivery through mobile nodes. Additionally, FANETs provide better coverage where there is a lack of roads. Generally, the goal of FANETs is to provide multimedia data to applications such as search and rescue operations, forest fire detection, surveillance and patrol, environmental monitoring, and traffic and urban monitoring. The above applications’ performance and efficiency depend on the quality and timely delivery of these essential data from an area of interest to control centers. This paper presents a Priority-based Routing Framework for Flying Adhoc Networks (PRoFFAN) for the expedited delivery of essential multimedia data to control centers. PRoFFAN reduces the FANET application’s response time by prioritizing the sending and forwarding of critical image data from the UAV to the control center. Our motivation application is crowd management; we believe that having important image features as early as possible will save lives and enhance the crowd’s safety and flow. We integrated PRoFFAN over the RPL routing layer of Contiki-NG’s IPv6 network stack. We used simulations in Cooja to demonstrate the benefit of PRoFFAN over conventional ZigBee.