Delay-Tolerant Networking for Tsunami Evacuation on the Small Island of Hachijojima: A Study of Epidemic and Prophet Routing

Abstract

Tsunami disasters pose a serious and recurring threat to coastal and island communities. When a large earthquake occurs, people are forced to make evacuation decisions under extreme time pressure, often at the same time as the communication infrastructure is damaged or completely lost. In such circumstances, the familiar channels for sharing information - cellular networks, the internet, and even landlines - can no longer be relied upon. What typically remains are the mobile devices that evacuees carry with them. These devices can form Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), in which messages are forwarded opportunistically whenever people come into contact. To explore this, we evaluate multi-criteria performance characteristics of two DTN routing schemes in a pre-tsunami evacuation scenario for the island of Hachijojima, Japan use case.