DRT mobility model for search and rescue operations based on catastrophic intensity to improve the quality of services

Communication and coordination amongst rescue teams in post-disaster areas (DAs) are essential during search and rescue (SAR) operations. The physical infrastructure network may be partially or fully damaged due to the disaster's nature, hindering communication between rescue teams and delaying the broadcast of information. This paper aims to enhance the quality of services in post-DA by addressing the difficulties of network communication caused by the obstacles and tactical zones, and unrealistic node movement due to the mobility speed of the disaster rescue teams (DRT). Hence, a DRT mobility model is proposed and implemented to simulate DRTs' movement realistically in post-DA. This study modifies the previous DA model by separating the incident location (IL) into four risk-based zones based on catastrophic intensity (CI) values using network simulator 2 (NS2). The network performance of the DRT model outperformed the DA model, achieving a 2.5% improvement in throughput, a 5.4% improvement in PDR, an 83% reduction in overhead, a 5.4% improvement in packet loss rate, and a 0.3% improvement in E2E delay. As a result of improved routing protocol efficiency shown by the higher value of packet delivery ratio (PDR), there is less packet congestion and communication overhead between the rescue teams. This result shows that the proposed method is better in the effectiveness of the communication for the rescue teams to be applied in mobile ad hoc network (MANET). Recommendations for future work are outlined for this study to be extended by considering the movement of the victims in a post-DA.