Scheduling of Contingency Cellular Network Deployment
When stricken by a large-scale disaster, the efficiency of disaster response operation is very critical to life saving. We propose to build a contingency cellular network to support emergency communication in large scale natural disasters by connecting disconnected base stations. This paper addresses the deployment scheduling problem. The advance of mobile communication technologies has brought great convenience to users. Cellular phone becomes the first communication tool most people would use in emergency. However, cellular networks were usually crashed due to earthquake, typhoons or other natural disasters due to power outage or backhaul broken. Unfortunately, the efficiency of communication system is a critical factor to the success of disaster response operation such as resource allocation as well as coordination of rescue and relief operations. We designed a contingency cellular network (CCN) by connecting physically intact but service-disrupted base stations together with wireless links. As the disaster area's transport system may be paralyzed, the construction of CCN may have to reply on air transportation such as helicopter or even airdrop. Since the transportation capacity may be very limited, scheduling of CCN deployment order according to the demand of disaster operation becomes an important issue. We model the CCN Deployment Scheduling Problem into a combinatorics optimization problem aiming to maximize disaster operation efficiency. The problem is proven NP complete. Thus, we design an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the problem when it is needed in urgent.