A Study of IoT-based Post-Disaster Management
Md Kamruzzaman1, Nurul I Sarkar1, Jairo Gutierrez1; Sayan Kumar Ray2
1School of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand
2Faculty of Business and Information Technology, Manukau Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand.
Abstract— In recent decades, serious natural or man-made disasters
such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and 9/11 have occurred with
catastrophic consequences. To minimize the damage or loss of lives in
the aftermath of a disaster, it is important that rescuers are able to track
the trapped victims and perform coordinated relief efforts
immediately. The traditional telecommunication system (e.g. a
landline or cellular network) may be either partially or entirely
damaged by a disaster incident. Internet of Things (IoT) is a promising
technology that can be used to solve some of the problems mentioned
above. To date, the application of IoT in post-disaster management is
still an unexplored problem. The objective of this paper is to study the
IoT-based proposals for post-disaster management framework. It
discusses the key enabling technologies for IoT and provides an insight
into IoT-based post-disaster response and recovery. A new algorithm
(flowchart) for an ad hoc network formation linked to device-to-device
communications towards a robust post-disaster management
framework is presented.
Keywords—Disaster communication, Device to Device
communication, Internet of Things, Public Safety.
I. INTRODUCTION
Natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunami not only
left its devastating footprint into structural buildings and transport
infrastructure but also in essential critical infrastructures such as power
grids, utility services and communication systems. Immediately after
the Haiti (Jan 2010), and Christchurch (Feb 2011) earthquakes, the
Japan tsunami (March 2011) and the Nepal earthquakes (April 2015),
telecommunication systems were adversely impacted by electricity
outages, last mile connectivity loss, network traffic congestion etc.
These natural disaster not only collapsed the communications network
but also severely hampered the emergency assistance for the people in
the affected areas by the relief teams.
Due to climate change, among other causes, natural disasters have
increased significantly over the years and that is not only costing us in
terms of assets/infrastructure damage but also in significant losses of
human lives. While we cannot stop the occurrence of natural
calamities, with the help of modern technology one can save people’s
lives more effectively. Communications systems during a natural
disaster can be the difference between life and death for those in the
affected areas [1]. Despite having great advancement in
communication technologies, lack of ingenuity in using its
communication systems was prominent in Nepal’s earthquake in 2015.
During that time Red Cross and leading companies such as Google Inc.
and Facebook have tried to provide tools to connect affected people
and rescue teams. However, due to great greater impact of power
failure and huge last mile connectivity failure of communication
networks prevented nearly all connection between rescue teams,
people, family members and aid workers [2]. We all know that in such
disaster-stricken areas, the first 24-48 hours are crucial to assess the
situation and to save lives. Communications become a vital means of
978-1-5090-5124-3/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
life-saving efforts and critical decision making. The trapped victims
may have the following questions:
Where can I get drinking water? Where can I get medical support?
Can I use this road to reach in a safe place? How can I get shelter
from bad weather?
Many of these questions can be answered with access to the right
information [3]. During this critical time, rescue workers and
government officials coordinate their efforts and locate victims who
may be injured or trapped, but relief efforts can be paralyzed or
severely delayed if the responding agencies are unable to communicate
with one another. Despite having availability of several
communication technologies the question is how do they perform in
critical situations such as natural disasters and to what extend we can
rely on them? [2], [4]
Though a very good number of research efforts have been carried out
on IoT based applications such as smart home, smart cities, smart
vehicles, traffic management, healthcare, and critical infrastructure
systems (such as power generation and distribution etc.), unfortunately
only a limited number of efforts have focused on the post-emergency
communication strategy. Here we articulate how IoT based D2D ad-
hoc networking can become an effective ways of communication
during such a disaster situation.
The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the existing IoT-
based work and highlight a possible solution for post-disaster response
management. The main strength of this paper is the emphasis that IoT
can be a promising technology for disaster recovery.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the
concept of IoT, device trends, and associated forecasts. In section III
we discuss the reasons for selecting IoT-based communications as a
helpful technology for disaster communications. Section IV provides
a summary of advanced research about D2D communication for
disaster management, and in section V we discuss our IoT-based
communication proposal. Finally, in section VI we present the
conclusions and identify open research challenges to develop an IoT-
based disaster resilient communication network.
II. BASIC CONCEPT OF IOT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a recent communication paradigm that
envisions a future internet of interconnected devices. The term was
coined in 1999 by Ashton Kevin and he referred the IoT as uniquely
identifiable interoperable connected objects using radio-frequency
identification (RFID) technology. However, the definition of IoT
became clearer when the International Telecommunication Union
(ITU) released the "ITU Internet Report 2005 and recommended the
concept of the Internet of Things" during the World Summit on the
Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on November 17, 2005 [5]. Later
in 2009, the ITU, the UN’s specialized agency for information and
Communication technologies, defined Internet of things (IoT) as “A
global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced
services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on
406 ICOIN 2017
existing and evolving interoperable information and communication
technologies"[7]. It is obvious that by taking the advantages of device
identification, data capture, processing and communication
capabilities, the IoT will make possible the full use of things to offer
services to all kinds of applications, whilst ensuring that security and
privacy requirements are fulfilled. From a broader perspective, the IoT
can be perceived as a vision with technological and societal
implications [8].

In 2013, IERC (IoT European Research Center) stated that IoT is "A
dynamic global network infrastructure with self-configuring
capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication
protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical
attributes, and virtual personalities and use intelligent interfaces, and
are seamlessly integrated into the information network" [9].
Figure 2: Dimension of the Internet of Things [5]

Figure 1: The IoT defined [10]

From technical standardization point of view, the IoT can be seen as a

global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced Figure 3: Enabling technologies for IoT [11]
services by interconnecting things based on existing and evolving
interoperable information and communication technologies (ICT). It is
expected that IoT will be greatly integrated with leading technologies III. MOTIVATION TOWARDS IOT BASED COMMUNICATIONS
which are related to advanced machine-to-machine communication,
autonomic networking, data mining and decision-making, security and
The IoT is a technological revolution that represents the future of
privacy protection and cloud computing, to interact with technologies
computing communications and it is changing at a fast pace. This
for advanced sensing and actuation.
revolution will change the way currently people work, think and live
their lives [14]. All the necessary objects in day to day life will be
As shown in Figure-2, the IoT adds the dimension of "Any THING
connected to each other’s and exchange information as per
communication" to the information and communication technologies
requirements without having any human intervention. The
(ICTs) which already provide "any TIME" and "any PLACE"
convergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, big data
communication [5]. Now IoT can be considered as a global network
analytics and the growth in connected devices is enabling a large range
infrastructure composed of numerous physical and virtually
of IoT applications. Indeed, the paradigm of IoT finds application in
interconnected devices which are capable of being identified and
many different domains such as healthcare [15-16], smart
integrated automatically into communication networks. Figure 3
homes/buildings [17, 25], social networks [18], smart cities [19-21],
illustrates the enabling technologies for IoT.
smart vehicles [22], power grid management [23-24], and many others.
Over the past decades, the Internet has evolved from a static repository
An urban IoT, indeed, may bring a number of benefits in the
of interlinked Hypertext documents to a dynamic universe of
management and optimization of traditional public services, such as
networked humans, machines, and applications [12]. The number of
transport and parking, lighting, surveillance and maintenance of public
Internet-connected devices is growing at an astonishing rate.
areas, preservation of cultural heritage, garbage collection, salubrity of
According to Cisco, in 2012, there were about 8.7 billion connected
hospitals etc. [20]. These IoT-based applications will bring
devices and Cisco predicts in 2020 there will be more than 50 billion
revolutionary changes in human lifestyle. Similarly, IoT-based D2D
total connected devices making this new mesh the largest available
communications not only helps us to do better in disaster management
network ever [13]. Not only will the connected devices, but also
but also help to offload network traffic even in a normal situation. In
smartphone connections jump to 6.1 billion in 2020. Figure 4 depicts
this study, we are mainly focused on how we can use the IoT for
the trends of IoT devices and world population with forecasts till 2020.
communications while the traditional cellular communication
infrastructure are not available or having problems.

407

Figure 4: The growth of connected devices [13]
The following literature study may help us to find out the way IoT can
be used for improved communication in post-disaster management
scenarios.
IV. RELATED WORK
Several solutions have been proposed by researchers to effectively
maintain communications after a disaster. In [26], Hassan et al.
propose a D2D-based mobile cloud architecture where cluster
coverage will be determined by UE’s residual energy, SINR and
multicast information of their respective clusters. However, this
proposed architecture is energy efficient only for a single eNode-B and
it does not allow the coverage extension that will impede it ideal for
public safety applications.
Significant enhancements in coverage and capacity are proposed in the
3GPP LTE-A standard where huge performance gains can be achieved
by introducing a higher number of small cells in a configuration called
Heterogeneous Network (HetNet). During disaster situations in urban
areas, due to the presence of cellular network infrastructure with
decent coverage, a Self-Organizing Network (SON) was proposed in
[27-29]; this solution can be an efficient option for optimizing network
resources’ characteristics such as coverage, capacity, user mobility and
energy savings which are very import for a disaster scenario. In their
work, instead of D2D communications, they propose HetNets as a
mean of communication during disasters. Nevertheless, the authors do
not outline what would happen if the traditional network is damaged
or out of service due to the disaster.
In [34], Hunukumbure et al. echo the concern about the lack of
resourcefulness and of human innovation to provide effective
communications during natural or man-made disasters and
emergencies. Keeping that in mind they propose a D2D based
messaging model for disaster situations and they optimised the user’s
device battery usage. Though each Radio Access Technology (RAT)
has a different Random Access Channel (RACH) mechanism, the
authors didn’t consider it in their energy optimization techniques. In
their proposal large zone or high macro base station (BS) will be used
for D2D communications after a disaster. These could be Carrier On
Wheel (COW) or existing operational Base Station (BS) which were
not affected by the natural calamity. In order to compensate their
uplink power limitation, the D2D communication device will be used
as a relay node.
In [30], Nishiyama et al. propose the concept of multi-hop D2D
communication systems that are applicable to many different wireless
technologies in contrast to existing various wireless communications
408
technologies like WiFi Direct and Bluetooth which are designed for
using only one- or two-hop communications. In this article authors
figure out how routing is important for multi-hop communications in
different technologies and finally present the future prospects of the
relay by using smartphones as D2D communication devices. This can
become a good solution to exchange message between any two devices
regardless of the type of routing technology adopted. In another
research [31], it is shown how the increment of hop count can
effectively enhance the capacity of a D2D system. This is because
increasing relay hops can effectively reduce the transmit power of each
UE, which also reduces the interference between D2D and cellular
users of functional and non-functional areas.
In [32], Huang et al. represent a Contingency Cellular Network where
each cell will be equipped with some special contingency hardware
like power module and an inter-cell communication module. The main
idea behind this is that when a cluster of cells or base stations (BS) are
isolated from the core network due to the damage of cables and/or last
mile connectivity issues, they will form an ad-hoc network using
multi-path topology among themselves and one BS, which will act as
a gateway, will be connected to the core network by either Microwave,
Long Distance Wi-Fi or using a Satellite link. The main drawback of
this proposal is that disasters not only damage the communication
system but, often, also damage the utility systems like power grids. In
such a situation, the BS will be out of power very soon. On top of that,
if the BS itself has been damaged by the disaster, it is not clear how
these coverage areas will be served.
In [33], Gomez et al. propose a highly decentralized LTE network
where Node-B/eNode-B can communicate with the User Equipment
(UE) without having any connectivity between Node-B/eNode-B and
the Evolved Packet Core (EPC). They proposed a tactical resilient
communication network where the UE itself is the enabler,
coordinator, and manager of the D2D network even without any
preliminary interaction with the access network. In that proposal they
only considered smartphones to form an ad-hoc network for D2D
communications. Whereas in our proposal (see Section V) we have
considered that all mobile phones, i.e. cellular network UE as well as
general IoT devices that have the capability to continue the
communication with substantial processing power and hence end-to-
end communication, will be connected to any heterogeneous wireless
or wired network which is available at that moment and the devices
will play the role of relay agent and or gateway.
In almost all proposals, authors have considered only smartphones as
part of their D2D communications whereas another huge number of
devices are unattended which can play a very important role during
disasters. We can outline the limitations of existing disaster
management systems as (i) they usually rely on existing network
infrastructure (mobile, broadband, Wi-Fi hotspots), that is prone to
disruption during a disaster e.g. physical damage or as a result of
overloading, (ii) systems using Bluetooth or similar technologies are
not adequate for rapid communications among devices as they require
manual configuration (iii) Wi-Fi in Ad Hoc mode need devices to run
as root e.g. Android, and they require manual configuration, iv) fast
depletion of battery backup power for BS as well as UEs.
V. IOT BASED PROPOSALS
As mentioned in ITU-T [8], IoT will be a heterogeneous network and
various type of devices will be connected there. Among them, general
devices including equipment and appliances for different IoT
application domains such as industrial machines, home electrical
appliances, smart vehicles and smartphones etc. These general devices
may easily be embedded with high processing and computational couple of days (iii) computation power and safety from physical
chipsets, and hence may communicate with various networks damage can be further improved.
regardless of the various technologies used. For example
- A working Base Stations (BS) of a cellular network (by luck
or located nearest to the disaster area)
- A working wired connection
- A device capable to communicate with satellite
- Rescue personnel who may use a conventional public safety
network etc.

In this context, we are also proposing to incorporate a disaster mode

into all mobile phones. Whenever a traditional cellular network will be
damaged or out of service, the mobile phone will automatically switch
to and start operating in disaster mode (e.g. D2D communications
mode) as shown in diagram Figure 6 and this will allow the
conservation of the phone battery as long as possible, sending disaster
messages or placing voice calls to the concerned people; users will be
able to update their status and establish their location quickly to
facilitate rescue even if the infrastructure is damaged. The entire
process can be done by using an application (pre-installed) which will
be triggered once the necessity for D2D communication is decided, i.e.
when the traditional/legacy cellular network will be out of service for
a certain interval which may be called a beacon interval (D-beacon, i.e.
the UE will start broadcasting direct beacon frames based on which the
rest of the devices will join into the ad hoc D2D network) which could
be 10ms (LTE frame size) or any multiple of it. Whenever any of the
devices recognize the restoration of traditional network, ad-hoc D2D
network will be ceased and all the allocated resources will be released
to the normal conditions.

During traditional network breakdown, D2D communication be

initiated and formed an ad-hoc network where some of the devices will
act as a relay or gateway agent. These relay agent will connect the
affected area with rest of the world whenever they get any live
technologies such as Wi-Fi, Satellite or working traditional cellular
network. These relay agent may be selected based on the following
cost functions: (i) Device residual energy, (ii) Computational power,
(iii) Channel Quality Index (CQI) or Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SINR) i.e
interference, (iv) Bandwidth availability etc.
During ad-hoc network formation relay node may be selected based on
the above mentioned parameters and cumulative impact of different
cost factors. For examples if any device which has higher computation
power and higher residual energy will be got priority for being selected
as a relay agent. Hence
Pn ∝ f (Bres, Pcomp, Lint, NBW)
Where Pn is the probability of selecting a device as a relay
agent/gateway, Bres is the residual battery power, Pcomp is the
computational power of the device, Lint is the interference (from all
surrounding devices) and NBW is the available bandwidth of that node.
Based on these cumulative impact factors, link cost will be estimated
for each link those are part of this end-to-end communication.
Though different researchers provided various proposals but our one
is novel as we are considering not only the mobile phones but also a
huge number of powerful general IoT devices. It is important to note
that these IoT devices will provide better flexibility in different aspects
such as when (i) a special kind of chipset can easily be planted in a
house, car, office/industrial setting, energy meter, appliances, etc. (ii)
general IoT devices can provide longer battery backup, even for a
Figure 6: Flow Chart for Ad-Hoc Network formation
VI. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
In this paper we highlighted the key enabling technologies for IoT
suitable for developing an IoT-based communication framework for
post-disaster management. The paper also reviewed related work on
IoT and device-to-device communications relevant to disaster
management. Finally, a flowchart/algorithm towards an ad hoc
network formation for emergency communications suitable for post-
disaster response management is presented. Developing a system
model for the proposed ad-hoc network formation is suggested as an
extension of the work presented here.
REFERENCES
[1] http://www.itu.int/pub/T-FG-DRNRR-2013 (Technical Report on
Telecommunications and Disaster Mitigation).
[2] https://www.equities.com/news/is-there-a-solution-to-the-problem-of-
communications-in-natural-disasters.
[3] M. Herlich, S. Yamada, “Motivation for a Step-by-Step Guide to Set up
Wireless Disaster Recovery Networks”, 2nd International Conference on
Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management
(ICT-DM), IEEE, 2015, pp. 64-70.
[4] http://www.drj.com/articles/online-exclusive/when-communications-
infrastructure-fails-during-a-disaster.html
[5] “ITU Internet Reports 2005: The Internet of Things” in World Summit on
the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on November 17, 2005
[6] “Smartphone Disaster Mode,”
http://smartamerica.org/teams/smartphonedisaster-mode/.

409
[7] ITU-T, Internet of Things Global Standards Initiative, [29] H. Zhang,C.Jiang, Rose Q. Hu, Yi Qian, “Self-organization in disaster-
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/gsi/iot/Pages/default.aspx resilient heterogeneous small cell networks”, IEEE Network, vol.30, no.2,
[8] The International Telecommunication Union, ITU-T Y.2060-(06/2012) - pp. 116-121, 2016.
Next Generation Networks - Frameworks and functional architecture [30] H. Nishiyama, M. Ito, and N. Kato, “Relay-by-smartphone: realizing
models-Overview of the Internet of things. multihop device-to-device communications,” IEEE Communications
[9] http://www.internet-of-things-research.eu/pdf/ Magazine, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 56–65, 2014.
IERC_Position_Paper_IoT_Standardization_Final.pdf [31] K. Ali, Huan X. Nguyen, P. Shah, Quoc-Tuan Vien, Namadev B.,
[10] www.internet-of-things-research.eu/about_iot.htm “Architecture for public safety network using D2D communication”,
Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Workshops
[11] Li Da Xu, Wu He, Shancang Li, “ Internet of Things in Industries: A (WCNCW), 2016 IEEE.
Survey”, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE, vol. 10, no.
4, pp.2233-2243, 2014 [32] J. Huang, Y. Lien, C. Wang, “Design of Multi-Path Network Topology
for Contingency Cellular Network”, Information and Communication
[12] http://www.slideshare.net/mjadoul/an-internet-of-things-blueprint-for-a-
Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM), 2015 2nd
smarter-world.
International Conference on, IEEE, pp. 103-108
[13] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac79/docs/innov/IoT
[33] K. Gomez, L. Goratti, T. Rasheed, L. Reynaud, ”Enabling Disaster-
IBSG_0411FINAL.pdf
Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks”, IEEE Communications
[14] D. Singh; Gaurav Tripathi; Antonio J. Jara, “ A survey of Internet-of- Magazine, vol. 52, no. 12, pp. 66-73, 2014
Things: Future Vision,Architecture, Challenges and Services”, 2014 [34] M. Hunukumbure, T. Moulsley, A. Oyawoye, S. Vadgama, and M.
IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), pp.-287-292, 2014
Wilson, “D2D for Energy Efficient Communications in Disaster and
[15] Darshan K R; Anandakumar K R , “A comprehensive review on usage of Emergency Situations,” 2013 21st International Conference on Software,
Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare system”, 2015 IEEE International Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM),. IEEE.
Conference on Emerging Research in Electronics, Computer Science and
[35] Priyanka Rawat, M. Haddad, E. Altman, “Towards efficient disaster
Technology (ICERECT), pp. 132-136, 2015.
management: 5G and Device to Device communication”, 2015 2nd
[16] Phillip A. Laplante; Nancy Laplante, “The Internet of Things in International Conference on Information and Communication
Healthcare: Potential Applications and Challenges”, IEEE IT Technologies for Disaster Mgt (ICT-DM), IEEE, pp.79-87.
Professional, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 2-4, 2016.
[17] Pranay P. Gaikwad, Jyotsna P. Gabhane; Snehal S. Golait, “A Survey
based on Smart Homes System Using Internet-of-Things”, Computation
of Power, Energy Information and Communication (ICCPEIC), 2015
International Conference on, IEEE, pp. 0330-0335, 2015
[18] Haesung Lee; Joonhee Kwon, “Survey and Analysis of Information
Sharing in Social IoT”, the 8th IEEE International Conference on Disaster
Recovery and Business Continuity (DRBC), pp. 15-18, 2015
[19] H. Schaffers, N. Komninos, M. Pallot, B. Trousse, M. Nilsson, and A.
Oliveira, “Smart cities and the future internet: Towards cooperation
frameworks for open innovation,” The Future Internet, Lecture Notes
Computer Science, vol. 6656, pp. 431–446, 2011.
[20] Andrea Zanella, Nicola Bui, Angelo Castellani, Lorenzo Vangelista,
Michele Zorzi, “Internet of Things for Smart Cities”, IEEE Internet of
Things Journal, vol.1, no. 1, pp. 22-32, 2014
[21] Carlos Pereira, João Rodrigues, Antonio Pinto, Pedro Rocha, Fernando
Santiago, Jorge Sousa, Ana Aguiar, “Smartphones as M2M gateways in
smart cities IoT applications”, the 23rd IEEE International Conference on
Telecommunications (ICT), pp. 1-7, 2016
[22] Keertikumar M.; Shubham M.; R. M. Banakar , “Evolution of loT in
Smart Vehicles: An Overview”, 2015 IEEE International Conference on,
Green Computing and Internet of Things (ICGCIoT), pp.-804-809, 2015
[23] Raafat O. Aburukba, A. R. Al-Ali, Taha Landolsi, Mohammed Rashid,
Rizwan Hassan, “ IoT based energy management for residential area”,
IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics-Taiwan (ICCE-
TW), pp. 1-2, 2016.
[24] Ruixue Li, Jianming Liu, Xiangzhen Li, “A networking scheme for
transmission line on-line monitoring system based on IoT”, the 8th IEEE
International Conference Computing Technology and Information
Management (ICCM), vol. 1, pp. 180-184, 2012.
[25] B. Kang, S. Park, T. Lee, Shyun Park, “IoT-based monitoring system
using tri-level context making model for smart home services”, 2015
IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), pp.
198-199, 2015.
[26] S. Tamoor-ul-Hassan, M. I. Ashraf, and M. D. Katz, ``Mobile cloud based
architecture for device-to-device (D2D) communication underlying
cellular network,'' Wireless Days (WD), 2013 IFIP, IEEE, pp. 1-3.
[27] M. Peng, D. Liang, Y. Wei, J. Li, and H.-H. Chen, “Self-configuration
and self-optimization in LTE-advanced heterogeneous networks,” IEEE
Communications Magazine, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 36–45, 2013
[28] Maissa B., Sonia Ben R., Sami T., “A novel self-organizing scheme for
4G advanced networks and beyond”, The 2014 International Symposium
on Networks, Computers and Communications, , IEEE, 2014.

410