A-FC: An Activity-Based Delay Tolerant Routing Protocol for Improving Future School Campus Emergency Communications

Abstract

School Campus emergency communication systems are vital for safeguarding student safety during sudden disasters such as typhoons, which frequently cause widespread paralysis of communication infrastructure. Traditional Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) protocols, such as Direct Delivery and First Contact, struggle to maintain reliable connections in such scenarios due to high latency and low delivery rates. This paper proposes the Activity-based First Contact (A-FC) protocol, an innovative routing scheme that leverages real-world social roles to overcome network partitioning by mandatorily uploading messages to highly active "staff nodes". We constructed a real-world evaluation scenario based on the topology of Fuzhou No. 1 Middle School. Simulation results demonstrate that the A-FC protocol significantly outperforms baseline protocols, achieving approximately 68% message delivery probability and reducing average delay to 4311 seconds. With an average hop count of merely 1.68, this protocol establishes a low-cost, highly reliable backup communication model for school campus disaster response.