3DMAT: data dissemination for disaster management using available technology in a smart city

Disaster management systems (DMSs) aim to mitigate the potential damage from disasters by ensuring immediate and suitable assistance to victims. Disaster management is a challenging problem because while information needs to be processed in real time, the damaged environment can prevent it from being disseminated to processing centres. Our goal is to exploit available technologies such as Wireless Sensor Network (WSNs) and Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) to forward alerts from victims to rescue services. We propose an opportunistic data dissemination protocol (3DMAT) for disaster management in which both WSNs and VANETs participate in decision-making for the dissemination process so that messages are delivered in a timely manner. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol performs data dissemination more efficiently than other protocols. 3DMAT calculates the quality of nodes and the link between them to select the most relevant relay. Our protocol is 47% faster and generates a 17% lower communication load and 14% fewer redundant messages. These improvements are due to a selection strategy that targets the most relevant nodes to relay information.