Optimized Mobility Models for

Disaster Recovery Using UAVs

Onye Erim and Collin Wright

Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering

Liverpool John Moores University
United Kingdom.
O.erim@2014.ac.uk, c.wright@ljmu.ac.uk
Abstract— Wireless networks face limitations such as
energy consumption that varies due to topological changes
in the network, limited energy resources, transmission cost
that are relatively high and limited processing capabilities.
This research explored optimization of efficient protocols
and mobility models for MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc
Networks) in an example application scenario within
disaster recovery. The aim being to improve on
benchmark parameters for energy-efficiency and
connectivity by designing or developing an optimum
mobility model and selecting a suitable protocol. This
model will optimize throughput in a delay tolerant
network with energy efficiency as a plus. Existing research
work was considered and based on performance metrics
such as throughput, packet delivery fraction, end-end
delay, etc., an experimentation was carried out using
Riverbed 18.0 to test the scalability of routing protocols;
AODV, DSR, TORA, GRP and OLSR in conjunction with
various mobility models. A suitable protocol and a
mobility model were identified and are being modified to
be highly adaptive to topology changes and show network
resilience in terms of network routing load, network
density and mobility.
key words- MANETs, disaster recovery, mobility models,
routing protocols
I. INTRODUCTION
Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANET) are autonomous
systems having nodes connected wirelessly without the
need for a pre-existing infrastructure. In recent times, the
growing popularity in the deployment of MANETs from
simple sensors to large networks with varying
complexities has placed a demand on the design and
implementation of such network based on stringent user
specifications. This is faced with underlining challenges
with the most prevalent being the lack of coordination
between layers because of mobility of nodes, wireless
nature of the links (transmission) formed and energy
efficiency [1, 2].
978-1-5386-3531-5/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
When a natural disaster occurs, the survival rate of
victims depends to a large extent on how quickly rescue
operation commences in the "Golden 72 Hours".
Communication systems like base stations would
usually most likely be destroyed or malfunctioning
[3,4,5,6].
This paper presents the research work carried out so far
aimed at improving on benchmark parameters for energy-
efficiency and connectivity of MANETs formed during
an example disaster recovery scenario using UAVs
(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). This was done by
evaluating a range of existing mobility models and
protocols for MANETs to select a mobility model and a
suitable routing protocol based on analysis carried out on
the results of preselected performance metrics. It is
intended that a mobility model and a routing protocol /
algorithm would be designed/ developed to optimize
network scalability in terms of energy-efficiency and
minimal delay as compared to stipulated benchmarks.
Mobility models depicts the movement pattern of
nodes and how their velocity and acceleration varies over
time [3, 4, 5]. This has impact on cluster maintenance,
routing performance and network capacity. In mobility
modelling, movement can be shown using either
analytical or simulation models. A suitable routing
mobility model is chosen in line with desired network
metrics as required by the network and combined with
various routing protocols to ascertain the best fit.
The paper is organized as follows: Section II reviews
related research work while Section III details the
network setup and parameters. In Section IV, the
simulation results of existing mobility models are
evaluated based on pre-selected network metrics and a
suitable mobility model is selected. The network is
furthered analyzed by incorporating a set of routing
protocols to ascertain the most suitable one based on the
evaluation of results obtained and the conclusion is
presented in Section V.
 II. RELATED WORK
Research on optimum mobility models used in
disaster recovery has gradually become common in the
last decade. Simulations have been carried out to mimic
the movement patterns of both the rescue teams/ ground
crew and the victims in disaster recovery [3, 4, 5]. New
mobility models are inferred by evaluation results from
modelling real generic human movement patterns.
Random way point Mobility Model has generally been
the accepted choice of mobility model used by most
researchers because its modelling in simulation
environments is easier to carry out.
Generally, most studies are based on synthetic
mobility models but these models are the least accurate.
As such, it is important that studies based on real traces
of movement pattern be carried out to validate results
based on experimentation. Most research only
considers the mobility of crew members and ignore the
positions and mobility of possible victims in disaster
response scenarios. Furthermore, real-time design of
tactical movements for crew members is based on the
actual conditions of disaster scenarios with respect to
victims’ positions and their movements [7].
[8] proposed the use of a hybrid cellular MANET
architecture for emergency communication of mobile
nodes by connecting to the access points of vehicular
base stations dropped in the network or by utilizing
surviving base stations.
The modelling of the movement patterns of victims
within an urban disaster area in a more realistic way and
defining the best positions for the UAVs to provide
optimum communication services for the victims using
Jacquard-based movement rules is proposed in [9]. The
best tactical UAV movements were also selected by
comparing several algorithms such as random walk and
simulated annealing. OLSR (Optimized Link State
Routing protocol) was not suitable for networks with
high nodal densities due to problems of scalability.
Research related to MANETs have borrowed
routing protocols and mobility models from the
traditional Ad Hoc networks. However, due to the
specific demands imposed by some application
scenarios, protocols and mobility models need to be
optimized [8, 9, 10]. This research has considered
existing mobility models, tested them against desired
network bench parameters and selected a suitable
mobility model. Proactive, reactive and hybrid
protocols were also tested in conjunction with the
selected mobility model while maintaining boundary
conditions of the network to ascertain their scalability
with increased nodal densities. effective bandwidth that
is available to each node in the network for wireless
transmissions.
The novelty of the planned research is to consider
existing research and seek to improve on benchmark
parameters for energy-efficiency and connectivity by
designing or developing an optimum mobility model and
a set of cross layer protocols/ algorithms. Although the
use of UAVs in addressing the problem of providing
communication services to victims during disaster
recovery operations have been proposed, this research
work would be building on other research by proposing
the most energy-efficient way to facilitate
communication between the people on the ground and the
drones. This would be by:
• selecting the most suitable mobility model that
would be used in a disaster recovery operation by
both rescue teams and victims to be rescued.
• Making use of existing technological resources
(such as mobile devices people will have on
them) for effectively managing rescue operations.
• Proposing a suitable routing protocol that would
work best with the identified mobility model.
III. NETWORK SIMULATION AND
IMPLEMENTATION
Riverbed Modeler 18.0 was used. It is an optimised
network-engineering tool that is used in building
hierarchical network models and manage complex
network topologies with unlimited sub-network nesting.
It can simulate models with varying communication links
and applications like FTP, email, VOIP, etc.
The Scenario
A. Assumptions made:
i. Due to a natural or man-made disaster,
telecommunication base stations have collapsed.
ii. The disaster site is a square area set to a city
Centre size of 500 meters by 500 meters.
iii. People (ground nodes) have some sort of smart
device that can support applications.
iv. Ground nodes are randomly positioned and are
moving in a predefined mobility pattern.
v. Any of the ground nodes can send data packets
via a node that is connected to any of the UAVs,
if it is unable to connect to the UAV closest to it.
vi. The energy capacity of the UAVs is not a concern
as there could be replacement drones.
vii. A suitable metric/ algorithm is used for evenly
distributing the UAVs to ensure the adequate
coverage of the disaster area.
B. Network scenario configuration:
The Initial disaster area would contain 30 Ground
nodes (WLAN workstations) representing a mix of
people to be rescued and rescue teams. 3UAVs having
mini WLAN work stations fitted aboard them are
deployed to enable communication amongst the ground
nodes and the UAVs by creating a MANET. In Table 1
below, the Application Information specifies the mean
value (seconds) of an exponential function that describes
its Inter-repetition time within the profile and the mobility
models (also shown in Table 2) used. Each application
will run concurrently except for VOIP which is set to run
serially.
AODV (Ad-hoc on-demand routing protocol) is
initially used to test the scalability of the network with
links being formed only when required.
This selected mobility model is then combined with
the various routing protocols in Table 3 to ascertain the
one that gives optimal performance. Each scenario has
only one UAV and is run for 20 minutes (drone battery
power last for an average of 20 minutes).
D. Implementation of routing protocols
TABLE 3. ROUTING PROTOCOLS USED

TABLE 1. NETWORK CHARACTERISTICS

IV. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

A. Performance metrics:
C. Implementation of Mobility Models:
Throughput: The rate at which packets are successfully
sent and received in bits per seconds [11].
TABLE 2. MOBILITY MODELS USED a) Delay (seconds): Average time it takes a data
packet to reach the destination. [11].
b) Packet Delivery Fraction: Number of packets
successfully delivered at the destination to the number of
packets sent by the source [11].
c) Mean Opinion Score (MOS): MOS gives a
numerical indication of the perceived quality of the media
received after being transmitted [11].
The initial scenario is duplicated thrice and the
mobility models in Table 2 above are incorporated. Table 4. MOS QoS (Quality of service) [12]
Each ground node is given five movement sequences
by specifying their speed, direction and pause time. It is
also assumed that the initial speed (and direction of all
the ground nodes) = 0; the mean angular direction
(ground node) = 900; mean speed (ground nodes) = 7m/s
(average human speed); Maximum speed is 12m/s; and
maximum Angular direction (ground node) = 1800.
The parameters used to set up the trajectories of B. Analysis
nodes in the RWP and the Manhattan scenarios are
based on the individual behavioural patterns of the
models while that used for both the Gauss Markov and
the RPGMM are based on their modal equations.
WLAN Throughput, Delay and Network Routing
Load are selected for analysis in choosing a mobility
model because a key idea for this research is to make
use of devices which the victims to be rescued would
already have on them. Based on the results, the
RPGMM model is chosen as the best choice. The
Figure 1. WLAN Throughput (bits/sec) results for mobility models
quality of output generated would therefore show
which mobility model would perform best under the As seen in Fig1, Manhattan had the highest throughput
same network conditions. (1,875,000 bits/sec) but the simulation aborted after 15
minutes due to massive packets dropped. This could be
due to interference caused by obstacles such as buildings/
debris. RWP had a peak of 1,385,000 bits/sec but the
simulation terminated after 55 minutes possibly due to
variations in its movement pattern. RPGMM and
GMMM’s throughput gradually increased as the
simulation progressed with a high of 710,000 bits/sec for
RPGMM and 690,000 bits/sec for GMMM. RPGMM has
the advantage of the nodes moving in phase with their
group leader.
The delay results (Fig. 2 and Fig.3) and NRL (Fig. 4) Figure 5. WLAN Throughput (bits/sec) for protocols
show that RWP (0.09 secs) and RPGM (0.0005 secs) had
the lowest values.

Figure 6. WLAN Delay (sec) for routing protocols

Figure 2. WLAN Delay (sec) results for the mobility models

Figure 7. NRL (bits/sec) for routing protocols

OLSR also had low values for WLAN delay

(0.00014secs) (Fig.6) and good values for NRL (600,000
Figure 3. WLAN Delay (sec) results for RWP and RPGMM bits/sec) (Fig.7) in comparison with the other protocols.

Figure 4. WLAN NRL (bits/sec) for mobility models

OLSR is selected based on results as its results show
high values for WLAN throughput (685,000 bits/sec) Figure 8. http traffic sent vs. traffic received (bytes/sec)
(Fig.5)

Figure 9. peer-to-peer file sharing traffic sent vs. traffic received
(bytes/sec)
Figure 10: MOS values for routing protocols
The http Packets sent vs. packets received graphs show
that OLSR had the second highest values after DSR (see
Fig.8) which has the advantage of fast establishing new
route.
OLSR is the most suitable protocol for peer-to-peer file
sharing as it had the best result with values ranging
between 2,000 - 4,000 bytes/sec (Fig. 9). OLSR makes
use of MPR (multipoint relay) nodes which are selected
based on predefined thresholds.
The Acceptable QoS for VOIP are MOS values
between 3 and 5 [12]. The results suggest that any of the
protocols would work as they all had values ranging
between 3.99 and 4.02 as seen in Fig. 10
V. CONCUSION AND FUTURE WORK
RPGMM performed best and this could be because all
nodes follow their logical centre which is always
connected to the drone. In future, it is intended that a
modified OLSR protocol that will be both a transfer and
a communication protocol would be developed. It would
efficiently provide adequate support for the cluster based
mobility conversant with RPGMM. Rescue teams would
be divided into groups and each group leader would be
reconfigured based on energy remaining in the mobile
devices. This could be a viable solution for improving
energy-efficiency methods and reducing delay at the
Network layer. A more advanced approach could be for
the energy-efficiency to be considered as a cross- layer
combined activity [13,14]. The scalability of the network
in terms of complexity of applications and network
resilience would also be tested using higher nodal
densities. Various simulations are currently being run
with nodes densities up to 500; the results were not ready
in time for this paper.
REFERENCES
[1] “A survey of routing protocols based on link-stability in
mobile ad-hoc networks,’’ vol. 47 pp.1-10, January 2015.
[2] L. Conceicao and M. Curado, ‘‘Modelling mobility based
on human behaviour in disaster areas,’’ in International
Conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communication
pp. 56-69, 2013.
[3] Rosas et al, ‘‘Survey on Simulation for Mobile Ad-Hoc
Communication for Disaster Scenarios,’’ in Journal of
Computer Science and Technology. Vol 31, pp326-349,
2016.
[4] X. Kang, L. Liu, H. Ma and D. ZhaoE, ‘‘Urban Context
Aware Human Mobility Model Based on Temporal
Correlation’’ in 1EEE International Conference on
Communications (ICC), SAC Symposium Internet of
Things Track. pp 1-6, May 2017.
[5] F. Bai and A. Helmy,” A Survey of Mobility Modelling
and Analysis in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks”, Book chapter
in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Kluwer
academic Publishers, June 2004.
[6] H. Verma and N. Chauhan, ‘‘MANET based emergency
communication system for natural disasters. Computing,
Communication & Automation, International Conference
IEEE,’’ pp. 480-485, 2015.
[7] J. Sánchez-García, J. M García-Campos, S. L Toral, D. G
Reina and F. Barrero, ‘‘An intelligent strategy for tactical
movements of UAVs in disaster scenarios,’’ International
Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 12 (3),
p.8132812, 2016.
[8] H. Verma and N. Chauhan ‘‘Hybrid cellular-Manet based
communication Architecture for natural disasters,’’ in
MMU Journal of Management & Technology. Vol. 1 (1),
2016.
[9] D. G Reina, M. Askalani, S. L Toral, F. Barrero, E.
Asimakopoulou and N. Bessis, ‘‘A survey of multihop ad
hoc networks for disaster response scenarios,’’ in
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks,’’
11(10), p.647037, 2015.
[10] F. Bai and A. Helmy, ‘‘A Survey of Mobility Modelling
and Analysis in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” Book chapter
in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, Kluwer
academic Publishers, June 2004.
[11] ‘‘Riverbed Modeler 18.0 Documentation’’ in
https://support.riverbed.com/content/support/software/ste
elcentr al-npm/modeler-index.html
[12] http://www.livewire.com/voip-codecs/3426728.
(Updated February 2017)
[13] J. Zuo, C. Dong, H. V Nguyen, S. X Ng, L. L Yang and L.
Hanzo, ‘‘Cross-layer aided energy-efficient opportunistic
routing in ad hoc networks,’’ in IEEE Transactions on
Communications. 62 (2), pp.522-535, 2014.
[14] N. Sharma, A. Gupta, S. S Rajput and V. K Yadav,
‘‘Congestion Control Techniques in MANET: A Survey.
International Conference on Computational Intelligence &
Communication Technology (CICT) IEEE,’’ pp. 280282,
2016.